The vice president of retail sales & marketing for Microsoft Australasia has said that the technical differences between the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are ‘fairly marginal.’
Speaking with Gameplanet, Alan Bowman commented, "We’ve got a unique value proposition, and from just a pure specs perspective it’s always gonna be a fairly marginal difference. The purists are gonna argue the toss, but I think it comes down to the games.”
“You’re gonna see great exclusive games on Xbox One, and when you look at the cross-platform games, and there’s gonna be exclusive content on Xbox One. We’d like to be in more markets – this is a global business – but it’s also a long-term business, and we’ll progressively launch in more markets over the coming year.”
Bowman also highlighted the differences between Microsoft and Sony’s performance on the Japanese market, with the latter obviously having the upper hand on the Xbox 360 during the last console punch-up.
“That has been an ongoing challenge,” he said. “Being a local brand makes such a huge difference in Japan. Sony are so strong in Japan as its their home base, and they certainly get a lot of support from the customer as well as the ecosystem – the local third-party developers, who primarily publish for Sony.
“We had moments midway through the life of the 360 where we’d see a sales spike if we had Japanese developer content released. Japan is very [local] content-driven. Same applies for Korea, same applies to Taiwan. Most of north Asia is very content-driven.”