You know, I find the outcomes of E3 and the seeming dominance of Sony and the PS4 quite interesting. If we look to the past, at the beginning of the current console generation, the roles were reversed. Sony's offering was a bloated, expensive mess, including a technology that significantly raised the price of the console over the others. A technology (in this case, Blu-Ray) that not many people had yet to adapt or even wanted, in a time when HDTV's still had a minor presence among households. The winner of that war had seemed to be Microsoft. I say Microsoft and not Nintendo, because Nintendo opted for a different stategy, they didn't fight in that war. While MS and Sony were grappling for dominance of a specific arena, Nintendo was content to go somewhere else, and the newness of it made it an early favorite and propelled the Wii to a vast number of sales, whereas hardly anyone wanted to buy a PS4.
The first console of that generation that I purchased was a Wii. And it was fun, tons of hours flailing around in the living room. Eventually I got a 360 for the more 'core' gaming, and when I finally got an HDTV, I picked up a ps3 for the blu-ray. Today, I haven't touched my Wii in years (insert pun here) and it's damn rare that I ever turn on my xbox. The ps3, on the other hand, gets tons of use, for gaming, for blu-ray, for streaming media from my pc and netflix and all the stuff that Sony claimed people would want but the world wasn't quite yet ready for. So how does that hold up against this year's E3?
Microsoft feels a little too late in their embracing of media. The PS3 did this, and it turned out to be a winning move for the console, but it was a different time. I don't need an xbone to watch tv on, I've got a billion different devices that can stream different media to any goddamn screen in my house. Their forced technology this generation isn't as game-changing as Blu-Ray was. No one really cares for the kinect, and there's no real benefit to embracing it as a technology for advanced media beyond gaming (and no reason to embrace it for gaming, either). Sony, meanwhile, learned from all of their mistakes. They came out swinging with a battle plan that had been forged from a generation of war. Sony is as much a faceless corporation as Microsoft is, yet they've come to the conclusion that making gamers happy is their best business model, and they used this to great effect to downright humiliate Microsoft. They were the seeming underdog last generation, and managed to rise to dominance. Will they keep it this generation? It'll be interesting to see.