Gears of War arrived this month and it does the thing a platform holder desperately needs a game to do, which is make somebody who does not own the console feel stupid for not owning it.
That matters more this November than it would in any other year, because both competitors are landing within a fortnight of each other and Microsoft’s entire advantage is time. A console launched a year early is only a good decision if you use the year. Microsoft has, and looking at what is on the shelf right now against what shipped last Christmas, the difference is not subtle.
Gears itself is the clearest case. The cover mechanic is the sort of idea that seems obvious in retrospect and was clearly not obvious, because nothing else plays like it. What it really demonstrates is Unreal Engine 3 running properly on console hardware, which has implications well beyond one game. Epic licenses that engine to everybody, and a lot of studios currently deciding where to put their money have just watched it produce the best-looking thing on any machine.
The rest of the season is doing the unglamorous work. Call of Duty 3 arrives on every platform and runs best here. Rainbow Six Vegas is the Tom Clancy formula finally catching up with a generation of hardware. Viva Piñata is Rare making something charming and strange and aimed squarely at a household Microsoft has historically failed to reach. None of those are system sellers on their own. Together they are a library, and a library is what the 360 did not have twelve months ago.
Xbox Live is the part I would actually point at if somebody asked me why the console is winning right now. Not the multiplayer, which everyone has. The plumbing. A single identity, a friends list that follows you between games, achievements that turn a mediocre afternoon into a completionist errand, and Arcade quietly selling small games to people who were never going to walk into a shop for them. Sony is going to have to build all of that from nothing while also launching a console, and building it is harder than it looks because most of the difficulty is operational rather than technical.
None of this makes the hardware good. The failure rate is real, everybody knows somebody it has happened to, and the standard warranty is not generous enough for a device with that reputation. The disc drive sounds like it is trying to escape. The power supply is a brick with ambitions. I would not describe the 360 as a well-built machine, and I think Microsoft has been extremely lucky that the software got good before the reliability story got loud.
What happens next depends on things outside Microsoft’s control. The PlayStation 3 is expensive and short on stock and its European buyers are waiting until spring. The Wii is cheap and strange and aimed at people who do not currently own a console at all, which makes it a competitor for shelf space more than for the same customer. Neither of those is an immediate threat to a machine with a year of software behind it.
The threat is eighteen months out, when Sony’s first-party studios start shipping and the install base argument stops working. Microsoft’s answer has to be that by then the ecosystem is sticky enough that leaving costs you something: your friends, your Arcade purchases, your gamerscore. That is a real moat and it is the smartest thing Microsoft has built this generation.
For anybody buying a console this Christmas, the honest answer is that the 360 has the games and the other two have promises. I am aware that is exactly what everybody said about the original Xbox against the PlayStation 2, and it was true then as well, right up until it stopped being the thing that mattered.