I wouldnt be so sure.
After both consoles are announced and with all the goodwiill Microsoft have been gathering it will likely be alot closer than the beginning of the generation.
Remember the world was fully Playstation before the 360, then early that gen everyone was Xbox, come this gen everything has gone back to playstation......unless you have some super secret stats i highly doubt your predictions on nextgen user engagement are worth much.
This isn't true though, for multiple reasons:
- All of the "goodwill" Microsoft has earned this gen will not necessarily transfer over to next gen. Even if we sit back and look at what that "goodwill" did for them this gen, they still are on pace to finish in a distant third place and they at best kept up with being outsold at a 2:1 pace by Sony.
- The gen isn't a hard reset, since both consoles (and peripherals like PSVR) are backwards compatible. Sony is already banking on this hard as a way of just "pick up the new device and keep playing all your old stuff if you want, but also buy all this new stuff too!" in its messaging so far.
- The 360 gen is not comparable to this upcoming gen, since the 360 came out a year before. That won't be happening this time around.
- PlayStation is a stronger global brand than Xbox, which isn't a slight on either platform. It means, from a marketing and user acquisition perspective, it takes less effort for Sony to acquire a new user outside of territories like North America and the UK than it does for Microsoft. This means that Microsoft has to improve their global reach. Can they? of course, but even if you look at the heights of the 360, it was still very NA and UK centric.
- Will next gen be a close race at first? Maybe, but it could also play out in a whole bunch of other ways. One way is not more likely than the other at this point of time, but it does seem like Sony has the "inside track" currently based off their current market position and global reach.
The Switch can also disrupt both Sony and Microsoft, so there are still some unknowns unaccounted for. Stadia is also, an example of another unknown.
