One reader believes Microsoft’s days as a console manufacturer are effectively over and has a theory for where he thinks they went wrong.
Well, what a week it’s been for Xbox. We’ve had claims, by a notoriously pro-Microsoft insider, that the era of Xbox exclusives is over, then the head Microsoft saying he’s ‘redefining’ what it means to be an Xbox fan (he probably meant that to sound like a good thing, but it doesn’t), and then reports about the Xbox Series X being quietly withdrawn from sale in Europe. Oh, and US sales were down 29% last month, just before Christmas.
Short of a meteorite dropping on Xbox HQ I’m not sure it could’ve got much worse than that. But then we had a story about how analysts think there’s no longer room for three console formats and that it’s either PlayStation or Xbox that’s going to get pushed out. I don’t think you have to be a PlayStation zealot to think that maybe that’s going to be Xbox losing out.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think any of this is good news. Sony needs strong competition to stop them taking advantage, but I don’t think Microsoft has offered that since the Xbox 360 era. And even then only for two or three years, until Sony caught up with them and suddenly all Microsoft cared about was Kinect.
Given that Microsoft is worth $3 trillion, enough to buy Sony many times over, it is staggering how inept they’ve been at challenging them. Even buying Activision Blizzard hasn’t helped them, in fact that was the nail in the coffin.
Yes, they are now the biggest games publisher in the West but the price of spending all that money is that they cannot afford to release any of the games only on Xbox, so they have effectively forced themselves to become third party.
I don’t know what they mean about their next gen plans, and I’d be surprised if they did, but Xbox hardware is now nothing but a niche and I can’t see anything that would ever change that. And that’s for the simple reason that Microsoft never really seems to have understand the games industry properly.
I don’t doubt Phil Spencer’s passion for it but the simplest rule of gaming is that games sell consoles, but that’s something he’s never seemed to fully grasp. Or to put it even more simply, nothing matters but the games. Nothing, and yet that’s always been Microsoft’s weak point.
A few years ago, Spencer famously said that even a 11/10 game wouldn’t save Xbox, correctly pointing out that the PlayStation 4 generation was a bad one to lose because that’s when everyone became locked into an ecosystem and there’s no way something like Halo Infinite was going to coax them out.
The problem with this is, like most things Spencer says, it’s only half right. Yes, losing the ecosystem war was a serious blow but it wasn’t the end. Nintendo doesn’t have much of an ecosystem but things like that don’t matter to them because for them making great games isn’t a problem.
Spencer was absolutely wrong when he said an 11/10 game wouldn’t change anything. I checked and what he actually said is: ‘There is no world where Starfield is an 11 out of 10 and people start selling their PS5, that’s not going to happen.’
That’s kind of a silly thing to say though because there’s no world in which Starfield would ever get that kind of score or that that kind of game would appeal to a wide enough group of people to make a difference. Nor would Halo or Gears Of War or, I’m willing to bet, Fable. Despite all the money they’ve spent, Microsoft just doesn’t have that sort of talent to hand.
They had to basically shut down and restart the developers of Halo, the new team they set up for Gears Of War has made no impact, and I’m highly dubious that the developers of Forza know how to make a comedy action role-player.
If, however, Microsoft had made a brand new franchise, ideally a brand new concept, that was a great game and got great reviews, then that absolutely would’ve turned heads. But I’d argue the only titles they’ve ever had like that are the two Halos, over 20 years ago.
Despite being the youngest of the three console makers, Xbox has always had their head stuck in the past, convincing itself that its franchises are on par with Sony and Nintendo in terms of quality and popularity when they’re really not – or at least not in the last two decades.
They spent $72 billion on Activision Blizzard but imagine if they had used just a fraction of that to experiment with new ideas and new IP, things that could’ve actually made a difference. If they’d come up with next Pokémon or The Last Of Us. But they squandered all that money in a deal that killed their dreams of being a top console maker dead.
Xbox as a brand will carry on, sure, but it won’t mean the same thing as it used to. Microsoft has tried to paint this as a positive but it’s not. The only purpose of a games company is to make games and making your own console gives you an enormous advantage with that.
So yeah, they can be Activision Blizzard with a new name, and a few extra studios, but everything that Xbox was meant to be when it started out is now impossible to achieve. All the money in the world and they’ve been schooled by companies much smaller and less rich, but which understand gaming a lot better than they ever have.
By reader 84Colbat
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