All you talk about are fps games. Is that all you play for real? There are a ton of other genres that MS doesn't have any studios working on while Sony does. That will likely be the difference if nothing changes from today, not who has the most FPS games. So what if fps games sell? So does GTA and madden and fifa and NBA 2k. So will tons of other games that are not fps games. So you get the same people buying cod year after year and for a month you have good sales. The rest of the year you get stomped because you have no action and adventure games, no RPGs, no baseball game at all (there are still people who buy them). All of this is as important as the next fps game that goes online.
MS could use a good kick in the ass to get these types of games and expand beyond their standard audience. That will move more units and in turn push Sony's team to expand their vision beyond their core audience. We will all benefit from more unique and better quality games.
You're just DYING to miss my point, it seems.
For starters, as a HUGE baseball fan, it doesn't really sell. The top-selling version of
The Show is listed as selling 870,000 copies.
Halo 4 was at 8,940,000 copies. Even if every baseball game sold like the biggest one of the PS3's time, it would take them 10 years to match those sales of ONE
Halo game. So don't try to defend the PlayStation with baseball, because that's just not going to work.
As for those non-shooters you mentioned,
GTA,
FIFA, and
NBA 2K, they mean nothing. They're on both platforms, so they really don't sell one system over the other. While they're big franchises, they don't make you pick sides in a console war (if you're like many who don't care to own multiple consoles). It's about what each console offers over the other. I'm not ignoring those games' success, it's just not relative to the discussion of why you should pick one console over the other. For the record,
GTA V sold better on the PS3,
GTA IV sold better on the 360,
FIFA is favored on the PS3 (I think that's got a lot to do with Europe's preference for the PS3 as a whole), and
Skyrim sold better on the 360.
I'm talking primarily about FPS games because, at the end of the day, they are the most-frequent fillers of the charts. I pointed out how more than half of the top-selling games on each platform (75%, in the 360's case) were shooters. It's not to say that everyone picks a platform because of shooters. However, when the top-selling genre on console is the FPS genre, winning that genre in a head-to-head match with Sony is a big deal for Microsoft. No, shooters aren't all I play. They're just the genre which carries many of the top-selling gaming franchises (
CoD,
BF,
Halo).
You can say Microsoft has nothing but
Halo all you want, but it's simply not true. They already established
Forza, that's been going for years. The
Kinect stuff from Rare has sold reasonably well, and even
Viva Pinata was a title worthy of more installments, in my opinion (really liked the first one). Even though it's still a shooter (and it was started by Epic), they now own
Gears of War (we'll see how its quality holds up).
Dead Rising 3 is a semi-respectable game.
Ryse as well.
Quantum Break's a good-looking game.
D4 is coming.
Sunset Overdrive is also coming.
I can agree that Microsoft misses opportunities in the general third-person action genre a lot. They don't even compete with
Uncharted or
Infamous. But saying they're ONLY FPS games is as dumb as your statement that because I'm discussing FPS games, I only play them.
The real problem, if anything, is what the masses want. The simple fact is that shooters sell on the 360. As good as
Forza is,
Gran Turismo 5 sold more copies that
Forza 3 and
Forza 4 COMBINED. When you look at third-party shooters, they favor the Xbox.
Borderlands and its sequel totaled about 3.6 million sales on the PS3, while the 360 was at about 5.9 million sales.
Madden sells better on 360,
FIFA sells better on PS3.
But my overall point (and I commend you if you actually care to read through these ramblings to get to the end) is that shooters simply sell the best, as a whole. They are the top genre, so winning it is VERY important. It doesn't win you the hardware sales outright, but it means something. In addition, Microsoft's certainly got stuff outside of
Halo in the works for this generation, be it in-house or otherwise.