The War Within Console Gaming
Competition is prevalent in many aspects of life, competition with the self, with others, and especially so within a business. It is no different within the large gaming console companies of Playstation and Microsoft who have been looking to gain the upper hand over one another for multiple decades now. Each side has its own loyalists with their reasonings varying from the user’s preference of controller, UI, or game exclusives. When looking at these two juggernauts of companies going head to head it’s hard to tell which is on top and if one is, it doesn’t last for long with the other company coming out with a new cutting-edge feature to regain the upper hand in their constant game of cat and mouse. This constant “leveling up” between both Playstation and Xbox has continued to lead to new developments for at-home console gaming putting us in a place that we have never seen before in the entire history of console gaming. When looked at through the lens of Wikipedia and the power of the people’s voice however we can see more of a stark difference between these two powerhouses.
Before looking into the data it helps to understand the history of the consoles and the difference in the journey each company has taken to get to this point. Playstation started off with the Playstation 1 which came out on December 3, 1994. By the time the first Xbox came out on November 15, 2001, Playstation was already on its second console with the Playstation 2 which came out a year prior to the first Xbox. Furthermore, it should help to understand that Playstation is a company that challenges itself to create something that hasn’t been done before as well as push forward creativity while Microsoft’s Xbox philosophy is to make gaming accessible to everyone. These core differences in philosophies are more apparent in the different design choices that can be seen in both consoles as well as in understanding the core fundamental beliefs of both companies.
Looking at the Wikipedia pages for both accounts we can see that Playstation appears to have a more dedicated following with over 2,303 unique editors and 4,617 revisions in contrast to Xbox’s 724 editors with 1,593 revisions. Looking at that alone we can see that Playstation has over 3 times as many users fact-checking their page as well as 2.8 times more revisions than Microsoft’s Xbox. We can look at the size of the revisions as well and see that in comparison with one another it doesn’t even seem like Xbox is much of a competitor in the grand scheme of information in relation to Playstation. Though it is advertised as such we can see in the data that there is a clear frontrunner for the home consoles, with Playstation being leaps and bounds above the competition.
In this visualization, we can see the difference in Wikipedia page sizes with Playstation showing its strength over Microsoft which didn’t even have a page until 2013 which is when the Xbox One came out, the console that they sought to bring the fight to PlayStation with and to rival the Ps4 which was also released in 2013. Though the Xbox claims its philosophy to be to create more accessible gaming for the masses it appears that Playstation holds a firm grip over the market as well as the hearts of the people. Though we can see that as the years have progressed the difference in competition has slimmed a bit.
Looking closer at the two Wikipedia pages we can see that they both had very volatile revision rates spanning from 2013 to around 2018. More specifically Xbox after 2013 had been a closer competitor with Playstation with Playstation really coming to blows with them from 2018 onward. Looking even closer at 2020 which is when both companies released their latest console we can see that the margins have become very close between the respective companies with what appears to be Playstation starting to take an upward trend once again. Developing some context for this 2020 period helps to understand the difficulty to get ahold of the Playstation 5 which still impacts consumers today whereas the Xbox Series X doesn’t have the same issues in terms of getting ahold of the console.
Looking at each console’s Wikipedia pages we can see that Playstation had a page for the console almost an entire year before the console was released. We also see that the Xbox Series X and Series S came out with multiple versions to be more accessible to different consumers whereas the Playstation 5 only has one model. This ultimately goes back to the company's core design philosophies which Playstation creates to spur creativity and do what hasn’t been done before in contrast to Microsoft’s push for accessibility. It helps to better understand the difference between both companies' bases of operations with Microsoft Xbox being an American-based company while Playstation is coming out of Japan with a larger worldwide audience.
Looking specifically at both competitors’ most recent consoles we can see that the Xbox Series X & Series S Wikipedia page consists of 630 editors while the Playstation 5 article only has 386 editors. This is a rather large shift from the overarching pages with the Xbox having 1.6 times as many editors over Playstation. Something that stands as an outlier however is the Xbox Series article has 1,807 revisions while the Playstation 5 article has 1,448. This is a massive shift in the number of editors that the Xbox Series articles have and also helps bolster our perspective of Playstation’s die-hard fanbase.
Looking at the growth of both pages helps us to see how each page has grown and developed over the years in relation to not only themselves but also in relation to one another.
We can see that Playstation was on Wikipedia 5 years before Xbox was and as a result, it was a somewhat underdeveloped page in its infancy but come 2011 and 2012 when home gaming came more and more into the limelight we can see that there was a large surge in overall links for Playstation. Xbox started with a solid page and continued to grow steadily, but in relation to Playstation, they weren’t even on a similar scale. This can be in part due to the legacy that Playstation had already cultivated for itself as well as some of the more minute details we spoke of earlier in this article in regard to controller preference and console exclusives.
From the perspective of the United States, it always felt that there was a heated competition between Playstation and Xbox but when we look at a wider scale in relation to the global market we come to find that Xbox doesn’t have the same purchasing power as it does in the states. Playstation truly wears the crown for at-home console gaming with Xbox following in hot pursuit to pick up whatever it can as it tries to catch up.
This all circles back to the company's core principles regarding games and the environment that they are trying to create. Microsoft in a way is trying to make a profitable machine that allows people to get into games at a relatively more accessible rate whereas the Playstation continues to inspire and push its boundaries while also getting ahead in different aspects such as having games only for that console, focusing on what the machine inspires out of the consumers rather than getting the consumers to find inspiration about the console. Microsoft’s Xbox was a great jumping-off point for many people especially those in generation Z where they could get into games and understand what the whole world of online gaming is about and the ease of having it with the press of a button from their couch but somewhere down the line, it has always felt that Xbox was something that was meant to evolve beyond rather than something that would hold its users for an extended period of time. Either having users switch over to different mediums such as PC gaming, the Playstation, or dropping gaming entirely it has always felt that the Xbox was trying to recreate the magic that the Playstation had, and rather than finding its own shine it falls short when compared to the “original”.
The perspective of this is drastically different in other parts of the world where it is abundantly clear that the Playstation is king but in the United States with an entire generation that had grown up with the Xbox, it becomes unclear. This is for the most part a phenomenon that only occurs in the United States but as a result, there is a generation of gamers today that got into it all because of the joy that was initially sparked from their nostalgia for the Xbox and which sparks their love for gaming as a whole. Competition is a good thing, it inspires design, and innovation, and keeps competitors from getting lazy when we look closer at these consoles, both inspire, challenge, and push forward their users in their own way as they continue to strive forward in this ever-shifting gaming stratosphere.
