You're probably right; its hard to say when speaking in retrospect and on hypotheticals. Ultimately I tend to feel that the success of Xbox 360 is predominatel

You're probably right; its hard to say when speaking in retrospect and on hypotheticals. Ultimately I tend to feel that the success of Xbox 360 is predominately attributable to the early failures of the PlayStation 3. PS3 was WAY too expensive, inflation-adjusted one of the most expensive consoles ever made outpacing everything on the market today, and had almost no great launch titles. When you consider that X360 had CoD2 as an exclusive launch title in 2005, the story kinda writes itself; people may have bought the console on these points + the promise of Halo 3 in the future, but it likely would have done well without it. Its also important to recognize: The PS3 did outsell the Xbox 360 by the end [1]. Its definitely the closest margins of any of their competing generations; generally Playstation does much better, not just a little better. But this is not the sense that I have growing up in that generation; I have the sense that the 360 dominated. Reality is a bit different. Sadly; whatever gains Microsoft won during the X360 generation, Mattrick immediately threw away with X1 [2]. Their early DRM policies set Sony up to drop what is arguably the most effective piece of video game advertising ever made [3], the forced Kinect bundle communicated to customers that Microsoft's vision for the future is more important to them than the games themselves, and Sony got their pricing and launch lineup (Infamous?) under control. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_JVVUnCWnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_JVVUnCWnY [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA