Interview: Discussing Xbox momentum, franchises, Beam and more with Aaron Greenberg

Windows Central caught up with Aaron Greenberg at Gamescom to find out how Microsoft approach their franchises, what's next for Beam, moving beyond Gears of War 4 and much more!

[iTechHeads]

Momentum? Wut?

The only reason Xbox One "won" July NPD was because it had an average selling price of around $250.(That's $100 cheaper than the PS4 at $350) With that price difference it should have won by a landslide but it barely managed to win by 10k units.....again, I wouldn't exactly call it "winning".

Microsoft's position in the market hasn't changed at all. They are still relying on fire sales and free games to move units. There is no momentum here, at all. Now, if the Xbox One manages to win another month in August, that would be momentum. However at the moment its just because of the huge price difference, which not even Microsoft can keep up.

[COMMENT-OF-THE-YEAR]

NPD is also America only as well.

[Shubhendu_Singh]

Not even America. Just USA.

[KiwiViper85]

Sales figures? Really?

You'd have to be deaf and blind to not notice all the positive news is coming out of the Xbox camp lately. OneS, Scorpio, GwG, all the legit AAA games this holiday...

Sonys news is just depressing. No wonder there was no hardware announcements at E3. Could you imagine how stupid they would've looked unveiling the ugly slim with no improvement, next to the one s, and the neo next to Xbox Scorpio? Sony dodged a couple of bullets there, right?

I'm amazed that Sony still has so many supporters.

[COMMENT-OF-THE-YEAR]

Sales figures are an attainable number that shows what people are buying and not just their opinions. While people are buying the One S a bit more in the USA and remember, it won by like 10,0000 units. It isn't an accurate representation of how they are doing overall.

The Xbox One S is clocked up a bit on the CPU side with a scaler that allows it to scale to 4k which most people don't have yet and HDR which is good for lighting but not necessary. As shown by digital foundry (And you can google this comparison for proof) it has little improvement on many games even with resolution using dynamic scaling methods at 900p while the PS4 still out performs on most games pushing a higher count. If you are taking the news found on this site, then yes it might appear that way but remember this is also a bubble. You have people that literally have 3 or 4 accounts just for down voting while sales are typically what has been sold is a better representation of demand.

Some news is depressing but again there is a difference between the vocal minority and what is actually selling. Scorpio is selling an idea of 6 teraflops, they actually didn't show us anything and it wouldn't be Sony's first time battling against a higher spec'd system and still come out on top so I don't think that is a major concern considering PS2 vs Xbox and then again PS3 vs 360... which Sony sold more units’ year over year even with Microsoft major head-start on 360 and inflated stats with RROD rebuys, The failure rate was at 55% for the first couple skus over 3 years on that. Do the math, that's around 15 million and some people bought up to 3 or consoles over it's life span because of RROD

GwG.. PlayStation plus. whatever. They are both models that make you pay to play online with the conception that we are also paying for better service. They seem to be up and down here and there in certain parts of the year, I never really see to many crazy games on either that is to go crazy about. Either way just like everything it's subjective to the user.

PlayStation has supporters because they have a lineage that dates back 20 years now that has many IP's attached to it both old and new and is known for creating many new ip's over the course of a generation. They also worked well with many indie's and are great with 3rd parties so why wouldn't they? No one is dropping their PS4's for a promise of 6Tlops in a years’ time... or for something they can't even buy and I highly doubt and sales show this that people are crossing over for an XBOX one s..

[TheCommentator]

Beam looks like it will add a lot of functionality to the social aspect of gaming, and that's pretty awesome!