Control Resonant's Early Access Is PlayStation Exclusive

Gaming
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But it doesn’t work. Consoles aren’t selling anymore than they did previously. Besides the 360 had far far worse third party support than the series consoles. So many games just skipped Xbox. The Series consoles is the generation the best game support from first and third parties. Money was put into exclusives that wasn’t put into Xbox overall. Playstation right now serves as a great example. They’re struggling to put out games at all and choosing exclusives (even excluding PC) at their own detriment as costs continue to rise.

The Series Consoles aren’t going to sell as well as PS5 because the market has been fixed. People aren’t switching and the cost of trying to make them switch isn’t worth it. New gamers also aren’t entering the market so sales just end up being largely the same. If exclusives are the solution then why is it that after 30 years Playstation is selling roughly the same number of consoles? That’s the real problem. Games are getting more expensive to make yet exclusives aren’t selling to larger audiences. Spending 4 to 7 years developing a game and hundreds of millions producing and marketing it only to sell to largely the same number of people isn’t a sustainable solution.

The Xbox 360 succeeded by rebelling against the market leader. Not by copying them. It launched a year earlier and at nearly half the cost of what the PS3 would launch at later. It resulted in great success despite Xbox having very spotty third party support. That’s the spirit Xbox needs to carry on. The cost of exclusives is heavy in modern gaming. Final fantasy is a good example. Square took a massive hit financially by not being multiplatform and now one of Playstation’s longest exclusivity partners has abandoned them, lamented their choices at the start of this generation, and is launching part 3 of FF7 on every single platform day one and taking advantage of all that the Xbox ecosystem has to offer.

Not sure what you mean about developer support when that is where Xbox is investing a lot. Third part dev support has never been better and support for Xbox features like Xbox Play Anywhere, Cloud, and Game Pass is constantly growing. There are more games on Xbox than ever and they give you more value than ever.

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But they have sold 2.5 tile as many PS5s as Xboxes. The more they sell, the better the deals they can get from hardware manufacturers, the lower the price of entry for new players, and also the lower they’ll have to pay for exclusivity as the developers know that’s where they’ll reach the most players anyway. They haven’t sold more than last gen, but with raising prices across the board and milling of customers, they are making more money, just like MS is. Now, imagine if MS had 80 millions Xbox Series sold and the current profit margins, they’d be doing insanely well!

If you play by a specific set of rules, but all of your competition plays differently, you’ll never be competitive unfortunately, no matter how righteous you are trying to be. And I understand all the Gen A and Gen Z people not playing and PC growth and all that stuff, but you have to be able to please your current playerbase and attract the new one, not just focus on the future without guarantees of growth while you are bleeding on the other end because people aren’t pleased with the current product.

As big as MS is, they should have the means to do it as well as the competition, but the changes need to happen at the exec level and then trickle down as their employees seem to understand what’s good, but the higher ups seem to be blinded by PowerPoint presentations and excel spreadsheets.

I wish Phil’s strategy had worked, I really do, but being Mr nice guy unfortunately doesn’t work, even though I completely agree with you that it should.

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How people like you can say consoles aren’t selling anymore is beyond me, when the PS5 is close to 100 million sold & Switch 2 is the fastest selling console ever 12 months in & Im no fan of Nintendo at all.

For me, 80 to 100 million consoles sold is more than enough

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And despite having that larger install base Playstation is failing more and more to make those third party exclusivity deals. At the start of this generation they succeeded in having FF7 Remake be a major console exclusive, and now at the end Square is launching part 3 on every single platform day one. We’re talking about this on a post of PS having paid for 48 hours early access. And Control resonant isn’t just on Xbox, it’s Xbox Play Anywhere at launch. Despite less Xboxes being sold, Xbox continues to gain third party support and pull them into the full Xbox ecosystem while more franchises abandon PS exclusivity. Even PS first party is struggling as their attempts to remain relevant and modernize studios fail, pivots into live service by buying new studios fail, and their bread and butter continues to cost more and more to actually make. Playstation is doing well as gamers become more affluent but they’re literally struggling to keep playing their own game. I don’t think it’s wise for Xbox to copy them. Pleasing the core current userbase is important, but they’re largely staying put. Sales are already picking up again as major games finally abandon last Gen.

Also, bigger companies aren’t more willing to take losses. Bigger companies are less willing to take losses. It’s been an issue Xbox has had since before it came about. It’s a miracle Microsoft hasn’t pulled the plug. Look at how quickly Google gave up. Microsoft has shareholders to answer to and other businesses they need to invest in that make more than Xbox and have seen more growth than any console. It’s why Xbox has literally been on the chopping block many times or had (probably had) the margins. They’re not going to money hat to the level of Sony when they can see how well that’s grown PS and when it’d cost xbox more.

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Exactly & lets not act like Microsoft are saints, a lot of people dislike the brand for what they’ve done in the past, I have a mate who hates them for what they did to Netscape (if it was true LOL)

You’ve got to fight fire with fire, just like SEGA & Nintendo in the old days. Nintendo brings out a Gun, SEGA’s got to fire back, Nintendo brings out a FX chip, SEGA fires back with the DSP chip & so on.

That’s what’s been lost with Series consoles this gen, Xbox not countering Sony’s moves like price cuts, or exclusive deals IMO. Though I’m very happy with the moves our new boss is making & can’t wait for tomorrow.

I may have to phone in sick on Monday, LOL, as I plan to drink the good stuff for tomorrow’s showing & if Jet Set Radio is shown off, I may need a stomach pump.

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That’s exactly what I said. Consoles aren’t selling any more now than they had in the past. The PS1 launched in 1994 and sold 100 million units (the PS2 launched in 2000, so about 6 year lifespan). The PS5 as of 2025 floated between 80 and 90 million units.

For you that’s great. As a business it’s been 30 years and nothings really changed. It’s far worse if you compare them to their peak hardware sales. At the very very most you can say that exclusives are part of an overall strategy (they don’t do it alone) that maintains the console base. But they’re absolutely not growing console sales. Certainly not to an extent that keeps up with the rising costs of producing video games. If we’re talking about how Xbox can GROW in sales then exclusives are just blatantly not it. This is also a bigger issue for Xbox than it is for Nintendo or Sony (both of which are having trouble in paradise and are struggling to support game development at all (Sony) or just raising the cost to gamers for their games ($80 games isn’t worth bragging rights to me)). Xbox can’t afford to spend all the money they’d have to just to maintain being in third place and at the absolute best by some miracle selling 80 million consoles again (or realistically staying in the 50 to 60m range).

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How much money have they made though from selling their games on PS5 and Switch? I think it’s not even a billion dollars, and that’s not counting dev costs and the 30% share I’m guessing although we’d have to check up on that. So considering all that, would it really be that much for them to give up on a few hundred million to bolster their own ecosystem? Because realistically, what’s happening is you see that boost on PS5, but those are lost revenues on Xbox and possibly on their PC storefront, so it’s not actually extra revenue, it’s the same revenues they’d have previously gotten in their ecosystem from now lost customers, or at least partially from lost customers. Knowing they went from an 85 million console base to less than 60, to now less than 40, while Sony has managed to stay pretty much the same and we know at this point in time that we are like 14 or 17 million consoles behind previous gen in total, so MS is losing a lot more than Sony and for sure it’s not just Xbox customers leaving gaming altogether for PC or something else, it’s also Sony, which most likely means MS is losing more in the end to other ecosystems.

Loss leading products are a thing, and shareholders and all that will not get money if the brand collapses. The idea here is not to get extra money at the cost of losing your own business long term, the multiplatform strategy was and has always been a very shitty one and MS should have been able to diversify without needing to go PS5 and Switch. Making Bethesda and ABK games exclusive on top would have been a short term loss for a huge potential upside in 5-10 years; all they had to do was stand their ground and not keep changing strategy to please shareholders, which has lead to their demise. We are seeing the effect like in the UK with Forza almost closing the console gap for the month of May when PS5 has now reached price parity, so Xbox is definitely wanted by people when the price is right and the games are there. Japanese devs are much cheaper than western devs, MS should definitely have money hatted games there just like they did in the 360 gen. A few 40 million dollar JRPGs wouldn’t break the bank, nor would a fighting game, yet it’d make a big difference with the masses. They have also shown to be making bad choices like refusing exclusivity with several Chinese developers, who are also very cheap and don’t cost very much.

Xbox Series sales are basically where the OG Xbox was and MS lost billions of dollars that gen, while now they’re making like 26 billion a year in revenue or close to that, so I think they can afford to do something. They should at least put out their product in stores and advertise it, do bundles with their biggest titles as that’s an easy write off without needing to bring up the price of the system and it helps sell, and with prices going up, they won’t have a choice but supporting Series S/X for years in parallel with Helix, so why not start building your userbase now.

Numbers don’t lie in the end, what MS is doing just isn’t working.

I’ve bought myself snack and a case of beer, I’m ready for tomorrow as well lol! I’ll probably do an extra gym day today just to partially make up for it as tomorrow won’t be good for my health!

JET SET RADIOOOOOOOOOOO

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Realistically what’s happened is that Xbox console users have remained stable while releasing on PS and Switch has led to increased engagement in games and increased relevance against third party games that do support all platforms. Xbox's Matt Booty on Summer Games Showcase, 'Black Ops 6,' Game Pass

“We’ve been really pleased with what we’ve seen on Sea of Thieves,” Booty said. “In terms of some things that I can share that were encouraging to us is that when we launched Sea of Thieves on PlayStation 5, we saw an uptick in engagement on Xbox and PC. There’s this thing where you’ve got more people coming into the franchise, which causes more excitement, which actually grows the franchise overall, which, if you want to be really direct about it from a business point of view, allows us to continue to reinvest in that franchise and continue to grow it.”

That’s the only real data we have as it’s what has been shared by Xbox. And that’d be on top of the millions of sales and microtransactions and increased micro transactions on all platforms due to higher engagement on all platform’s. Everything else is estimations, speculation, and speculative reasons for speculative estimates. Only Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo know actual console sales numbers. Everyone else is just estimating with varying results. For example low ball numbers have put Xbox at 40 million, but others as high as 50 million. That’s what Take-Two suggested at the start of year. With the uptick in sales (estimated again) we’ve already seen as games finally drop last gen support, that’d put Xbox on track to outsell last gen which was shy of 60 million.

Regardless of what the numbers are, it’s a leap in logic to say they’re the result of multiplatform launches when the reality is that Xbox barely even made consoles to sell all of last year and partly even before. This has been the only generation where Xbox consoles got more expensive overtime citing inflation and then AI shortages. This has also been the longest last gen held on (literally until this year for major games like COD) and there’s a whole new type of sticky game with forever games like Fornite. There’s a lot of reasons for sales to possibly (again only estimates) be down. Exclusives aren’t an isolated case. We can look at PlayStation and Nintendo and see they really aren’t having an uptick due to exclusives. PlayStation is again doing relatively the same. Nintendo is even better evidence that exclusives don’t work. Their console sales history is sporadic. Every other generation has been a flop despite every generation having great exclusives and them never porting to even PC. The Switch succeeded by merging their handheld and home console users but even then they once sold bigger numbers with both together.

I’m not sure why you’re comparing Xbox’s peak to the series console, but not doing the same for PlayStation. Yes the PS5 by estimates is keeping pace with their first console 30 years ago (kinda, again it’s hard to tell with estimates and not detailed year by year data from Sony but the PS1 is said to have sold 102 million and lasted 6 years while the PS5 in 2026 (pushing 6 years) is floating around high 80s or low 90s). However, PlayStation’s peak is the PS2 at 160+ million. The PS4 ended a 7 year console generation at just shy of 120 million. If Xbox went from 85+ to less than 60 to now 40 to 50 then PlayStation went from 160+ to less than 120 to 80 to 90. One of those drops is a lot bigger than the other and it’s not the one that is putting Halo on PS. btw the first Xbox sold 30 million in about 5 years. A number all estimates show Xbox Series consoles have surpassed. In 30 years PS is selling either the same number of consoles in the same timeframe or slightly worse. In 25 years the only question is by how much Xbox is outselling their first console (is it by 10 or 20 million?)

Making Bethesda and ABK exclusive would have been short term loss for long term loss. Literally look at PlayStation. Look at Nintendo. They best both can do is stabilizing sales at worse than their peaks. They aren’t doing much better than Xbox in that regard. Arguably they are doing worse. Sales have dropped a lot more from their peaks and because they can’t spread the cost of their games all they can do is raise prices. Nintendo selling their games for $80 despite them have the most controlled scopes and lower production costs says a lot. PlayStation is struggling to put out games at all. They’re struggling to actually keep up with the times and as a result failing to put out games. The studio purchases they’ve made keep having to get shut down. Their high quality cinematic action adventure games are too costly to make and there’s increasing gaps between them. So PlayStation hardware sales have dropped even more than Xbox has from their respective peaks and PlayStation as a publisher is struggling to put out any game. PlayStation as a platform is also struggling to even be able to pay for third party exclusivity with even long time partners like Square abandoning them (people were calling Square second party at the start of this generation). But Xbox should copy that? They’re making over 20 billion in revenue BECAUSE they’ve become like the second biggest publisher in the world and as a business they need to grow that. I see no growth in PlayStation’s strategy other than them raising prices and getting lucky that gamers keep spending more. Xbox can’t crater their current success trying to chase others and copying others. I don’t want consoles to disappear and we need to stop pretending that the current strategies are working if we don’t want consoles to fade into irrelevancy. Xbox is in the most danger being in third place and under a larger parent company that isn’t as reliant on Xbox as Sony or Nintendo. Xbox needs to innovate and find new ways to actually draw consumers into their hardware and ecosystem. They need to do this while running a healthy and overall growing business. They can’t keep copying strategies from others that are stuck in the past and having to deal with the consequences (and Xbox doesnt have the clout to copy their solutions: imagine if Xbox was Nintendo, do you think people would accept Xbox charging $500 For the Series S or $80 for any game? People didn’t even like Avowed being $70).

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So selling 100 million consoles is an example of a product not selling :joy: One can can swing it both ways too. Ask many gamers & there tell you the 90’s were the best & glory days of gaming, never mind the SNES & MD barely sold 80 million consoles between them & pretty soon the PS5 will overtake the PS1 lifetime sales

You talk of Sea Of Thieves, remind me again why it needed to appear on the PS5 a console that apparently doesn’t sell anymore & is a dead format. Why did Xbox even need to look to the PS5 when Xbox is on Mobile, Cloud & PC?

I tell you why, because the PS market is still huge & generates big sales, if only Xbox had a userbase of 100 million consoles , we might not need to look to PlayStation, but let’s blame the biased press for that…

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You, Understand The Concept Of Love :wink: .

I may take my brother’s dog for a walk & that’s it for my exercise today. I’ve got 8 cans of Birra Moretti in the fridge & a nice bottle of Irish Whiskey. All ready for the F1 & then the main event… the Xbox showcase at 6pm

Think a sick day will be pulled tomorrow :rofl: , but it’s a price worth paying for Xbox.

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Okay now you’re just ignoring what I said and going with something else entirely. Whether or not 100 million units sold is good is a separate conversation. What I keep saying is that PS isn’t selling more now than they had in the past. A business needs to grow. The fact that 30 years later the PS5 is “going to” overtake PS1 sales in year 6 isn’t an accomplishment. The PS1 had a shorter lifetime than the PS5 will have (unless Sony announces the PS6 tomorrow and it launches in November of this year).

The conversation isn’t about if consoles are already dead. They are a lucrative platform of tens of millions of customers. All consoles are. That’s why even Playstation is putting some first party games on Xbox. That’s why in the case of MLB the Show Playstation was forced to. The conversation is about how Xbox can grow and the role exclusives could or could not play in that. Based on real data you yourself are now echoing, exclusives aren’t a growth strategy. Paying for 48 hours of early access isn’t how Xbox grows as a business. It’s how Playstation clings to their business out of desperation while the entire industry moves on.

And nonetheless while console users are currently a good strong spending userbase which has continued to accept spending more, it is inevitable that unless these businesses can actually grow consoles will die out. There is a point where consumers get priced out or where it just becomes too expensive to make hardware in a closed ecosystem or produce exclusive games. This is what we’re seeing now with Playstation. They just can’t pay third parties for exclusivity like they used to. They can’t even get out games like they used to. Its what we’re also seeing with Nintendo whose created a reality where Mario Kart cost $80 or $90. Xbox in third place won’t benefit from copying those strategies today. The best path moving forward is to find a way to make people actually want console hardware itself (not try to force them to buy them by shooting a game’s potential sales in the legs or paying money to make other platforms have less support) while also maximizing the potential of first party games. And honestly if that doesn’t work then I don’t know what will come of consoles in 10 years.

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