Occasionally, people ask me why Ars sometimes covers the relative sales performance of various consoles. "Who cares which console is 'winning'?" the argument goes. "I just want to play games." And my response is generally that relative sales performance has a direct impact on what games actually get made for the various consoles.

Case in point: troubled Ryse developer Crytek talked to Eurogamer recently about the potential for a sequel to its Xbox One launch exclusive, and the company expressed concern that there just weren't enough sales of the Microsoft console to make a sequel worthwhile.

"We have a good relationship with Microsoft. We are constantly looking at what we can do together," Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said. "We are not 100 percent happy with Xbox One sales right now. So we want to wait 'till the current-gen and next-gen catches up. For Ryse 2, we aren't saying it's canceled. It's our IP. It just has to wait for the right timing. And the right timing means higher installed base across next-gen."

Yerli's comments can be read broadly as dissatisfaction with the number of "next-gen" consoles overall; the installed base for both the PS4 and Xbox One looks relatively small compared to the tens of millions of Xbox 360s and PS3s already in players' homes. And Yerli said he hasn't exactly been dissatisfied with the sales of Ryse on Xbox One so far, placing sales "in the forecast of what Microsoft has always shared with us" thanks in part to "tremendous promotion and IP awareness."

Still, the PlayStation 4 has been selling significantly better than the Xbox One worldwide, even though Microsoft's sales performance has improved since unbundling the Kinect. Given that, it's easy to see why developers might blanch at hitching their wagons exclusively to Microsoft's console. Yerli told Eurogamer pointedly that Crytek can "do whatever we want with [the sequel] with whoever we want," despite rumors that Microsoft wanted to purchase the rights to the franchise.

For the time being, Ryse 2 isn't even an official project inside Crytek, and the Xbox One isn't selling poorly enough to look like a Wii U-style also-ran to potential developers. Still, if Sony continues to extend its lead with actual hardware in people's homes, developers will eventually be tempted to prioritize PS4 development.