Yeah I’m looking forward to Helix VR as well. Xbox would be smart to add support for games like Forza Horizon 6.
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I couldn’t agree more especially with the rumor of dropping game Pass for exclusivity. I would rather they work building exclusive experiences into their platform through both hardware and software features like they did with 360. The 360 wasn’t prominent for exclusive games but the amazing new features that was unlocked through online. Things like achievements, party chat, multiplayer, social activities, marketplace, Avatars, digital gaming, XBL arcade and more.
To some extent I can see timed exclusives or case by case as it feels like they are just wasting money developing for PlayStation since it looks like only Forza and SOT have done numbers there with the rest bombing. I honestly feel I buy more games because of Game Pass
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Asha said this at the Windows Central’s recent interview:
“Sharma told me that nothing is off the table when it comes to revising Xbox’s strategy — but finalizing the strategy will take time, and data parsing. On Xbox’s recent strategic decisions, Sharma said “the plan’s the plan until it’s not the plan.”
Right now, I need to learn, candidly. About the ‘why’ of these decisions, what we were optimizing for, and what the data says about the Xbox strategy today. That’s the honest answer. I’m looking at lifetime value, not just what happened in a previous moment, or in short term efficiencies and things like that. The plan’s the plan until it’s not the plan.”
So yeah in the end it will all come down to what Asha will make of the data and what her perception on the matter will end up being - are PS owners buying the Xbox games and are the sales any decent? and of course the most complicated question: is the extra revenue from multiplatform releases worth having the reputation of the “Xbox being the only console/ecosystem with no exclusives”? If from the 10 games that will be ported to PS5 only one has meaningful boost in sales/revenue (FH5 for example) is it worth it in the end? we (as the core gaming community) can discuss all those topics because it’s interesting and fun but when you are leading a business worth billions with hundreds of employees and ~50m costumers that have invested a lot of money in your ecosystem it’s a whole other story. Both sides have good arguments and there is no clear answer on every problem IMO.
The only sure thing is that I don’t envy Asha’s position here, every (hard) decision she will make will highly affect the future of the ecosystem. Let’s wait and see what she will do, either way interesting times ahead as always with Xbox…it’s being one hell of a roller coaster ride since 2001.
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My big issue is, you know, that in recent years, Xbox has felt more like it’s been appealing to PlayStation and Nintendo users. Also, the price hike for Game Pass and the tiering certainly did little to help in that regard.
I think its kinda obvious that no one wants a pissed off Xbox community, that is the biggest bang for your buck in the long run. So yeah, not a position I must want to have right now.
But I will say this: a refocus on Xbox customers, rather than PlayStation and Nintendo ones, is highly needed. Especially with how this was handled in the last two years.
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Thanks. Nintendo is great and all for what they do and offer but while their third party support is arguably the best it’s been since Super Nintendo, they still don’t get the major top tier AAA games day one. Indies are usually a lock for Switch 1/2 because they look and run well and a lot of people like to play them on the go which Indies are perfect for. AA games are 50/50 for Switch 1/2. They get some but not the majority of them. And of course, they’re not getting AAA games day one.
Only Capcom looks to be all in with the day one support but everyone else is either skipping Switch 1/2 or releases a watered down port months/years later. Granted, there’s great ports of Requiem and even Cyberpunk 2077 (even though this at it’s core was a PS4/XBO game console wise even though it should have been an Xbox Series/PS5 console game instead) but these are the exceptions to the rule.
Amazingly, when games get released on Xbox years later like Final Fantasy VII Remake for example, everyone shits on it all but yet when Nintendo gets a decade old port or close to it, everyone raves about it. Imagine if/when RDR 2 gets remastered and released on Switch 2. People will go nuts in excitement yet the game arrived 8+ years later. So much bullshit in this industry, it’s not even funny.
In fairness, Sony has released 28 new games this generation (up to MLB The Show 26 which I think releases in a few days) with 20 of them being from internally owned studios even though a few of these studios no longer exist as they were shut down by Sony in the same generation in which they acquired them. Through Towerborne a few weeks ago, Microsoft has released 30 new games this generation with 24 of them being from internally owned studios even though a few of them no longer exist as Microsoft shut them down in the same generation in which they acquired them.
Either way, all the top games on both PlayStation and Xbox are literally the same lists month after month. Sure, you’ll get a Yotei or something like that in the top 20 the month it launches but after that, barring a sale, it falls off a cliff. Exclusivity doesn’t work like so many want to believe in this day and age.
Anyway, enough of my rant. lol
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I mean obviously that’s not the case (most XGS aren’t launching on PS or Switch day one; some port over after timed exclusivity, but still not all do) and no games are being taken away: the benefits of being an Xbox customer are all still there. We still have our Xbox Play Anywhere, our cloud saves, our Backwards compatibility, our quick resume, etc. all of which Playstation & Switch gamers don’t get whether Xbox ports a game over or not.
What you are noticing though is that Microsoft sees the data and has decided that the Xbox customer base is a mature one (like it’s not growing ajymore). When Xbox was building up from 2014/15 - 2020/2021 they were desperate to grow the console user base and that’s when we saw the most enticing offers from them. Now Xbox sees that it’s not growing and the console market on the whole isn’t growing, so their business strategy is twofold: squeeze their console base & grow on other platforms (PC, cloud, PS, switch, mobile).
This also runs us back into the problem with exclusives. They truly don’t work, and I’d go out on a limb and argue that one of the reasons the console market is stuck being niche is because outside of trained console warriors, people don’t actually like a system where “the only reason to buy this plastic box” is for the privelege of being able to buy XYZ exclusive. Regardless, they certainly aren’t working now. Even Nintendo used to have a bigger customer base in their peak Wii & DS era. Playstation has sold around the same number of consoles since the PS1 with the only real outlier being the PS2. Exclusives do cost money to make and increasingly more money. Being exclusive also makes it more difficult to market and grow your game (most people want to play or talk about the games that they can play with all their friends regardless of the platform anyone plays on) especially live service.
Every for profit business will do what they can to make as much money as possible without losing customers, so I get all that. A big problem with consoles & Xbox specifically is that they aren’t growing in terms of users, so they need their existing user base to spend more money or to expand to other platforms and gain new customers through that. However, gamers also push back on them doing the latter (expanding to other platforms), so we’re in this awful limbo. There is a major issue with pricing in the console market right now. Nintendo jumping the gun on $80 games was crazy as is all their pricing for hardware (arguably especially Nintendo for the strength its hardware offers). Though the PS5 Pro still exists at $700 before the inflation and ram shortages price increases. The Xbox Series S (budget console) is now almost what the Series X & PS5 launched at. It’s crazy and customers are starting to get priced out. I think that’s a much bigger concern than exclusives. People aren’t really switching systems when the most popular games are literally on mobile phones. The top charts on Xbox & PS are VERY similar. People also have their libraries locked down at this point. What seems like the biggest concern to me are people just being priced out and then choosing not to upgrade because those popular games are still on last gen as well.
Then we come back to exclusives and Xbox’s whole “vision”, and really what recourse is there to “not piss off” the community when that’s the result of both of the only two realistic options? Either Xbox follows Nintendo and prices their hardware and games higher to keep the full ecosystem exclusive (imagine the Series S launching at $450 and as their only console and games like Starfield at $80) or the keep pushing the “Xbox everywhere” strategy and grow with new customers on new platforms. Honestly, the former is kinda out entirely because Xbox is several decades too late to be Nintendo. And I don’t think they can offer “both” options, because I think there’s a reason Nintendo doesn’t launch a Switch 2 Ultra at the same time as the base model because multiple SKUs and price points inevitable leads to people focusing on the most expensive/powerful for discussion (like the same with multiple Game Pass tiers; no one talks about premium or essential/core; they fixate on Ultimate). We’re left with a strategy to grow, but Xbox can’t really do that either without catching a lot of flack online and the community insisting Xbox is abandoning them. So we’re left with this awkward limbo where Xbox is both raising prices for existing customers and trying to grow their business outward through expanding to more platforms. No one is happy. My genuine hope is for Xbox to grow on all platforms and for that growth to be reinvested into the ecosystem with focused value given to core Xbox gamers. Hopefully Xbox and Sharma can achieve that; it does seem like a marketing problem at the core.
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They had wanted to shift to that, but they ended up cancelling most of their GAAS projects anyway.
Also, I do not believe that Marathon is that huge. They need better numbers to go on and justify the continual investment in the title, while Destiny has seen a huge drop in numbers. One might suspect that the numbers that we see for Marathon could just be some of the Destiny fan base moving along to something new from Bungie. The game has not been that great either.
As for Xbox, the only way that the ecosystem make sense is if there are games and users flocking into it. This is what allows the storefront tax, and it is what allows the publisher to go on and take risks elsewhere, be it exclusives that they publish themselves, or timed exclusives, or investments into Game Pass.
Those benefits accrue from scale. You do not get scale when all your big games are going to rival platforms. That is taking money today while sacrificing the future of the very hardware you are trying to sell.
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In theory they could use the money made from their games on other platforms (especially when that includes COD, Horizon, and Forza) to support a wider ecosystem that offers more value to users and developers/publishers. I guess the question is, why does it have to be exclusives? I’d easily say Xbox is failing to offer value to its gamers more on price than by choosing to have multiplatform games. Developers and publishers are already supporting Xbox more than ever and at GDC Xbox once again had a strong showing of why there’s value in doing so (from free Playfab tools to Xbox Play Anywhere games making more money). Doesn’t that Sony chose (or in the case of MLB the Show were forced to) to port over even their live service exclusives show the value of the Xbox userbase? For me as a user there’s not an exclusive Playstation could develop or even an existing game they could make exclusive or a game Xbox could port that’d make me even consider buying a Playstation so long as free cloud saves aren’t a thing.
Existing console ecosystems aren’t really growing with exclusives. It’s a protective strategy. That’s not bad, but it’s one that needs to evolve. I’d say exclusives themselves are an example of taking money today while sacrificing the future of hardware. The way the console market has chosen to compete has not proven popular with the general public. The people that grew up with them live and die by exclusives, but everyone else is avoiding consoles for more open ecosystems and choosing to play blackhole games that are available seamlessly everywhere instead of exclusives.
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I think it all depends on what Microsoft is looking at in the long run. There is the thought they more be trying to drive gaming into a single platform model like movies, music and so on. In which case the multiplatform bet comes in, this may also be a play similar to an adoption of a future model that can’t be stopped. I think of how Netflix displaced Block buster and video rentals and how Apple and Google did the same to Microsoft in the Mobile space. Gaming is changing and adapting is necessary to stay afloat.
Right now, I think time exclusives would be a good middle line. I also think Xbox needs a global presence, maybe the Xbox mode will help here. There is also this AI slop situation. Somehow, I think AI will or might eventually require its own platform which could be gaming centered especially with this AI filters and this new DLSS5. There could be a play for new hardware much like the smart phones for something that brings all this together.
I think console is important because it acts as the foundation and home. I think one can see just how far Xbox seemed to have fallen just for pushing people off console. Cloud is great but I think they weren’t able to build a gaming community on it that profited the business, that could probably be averted if the console foundation is strong enough to absorb any negative impact or loss much like Sony has done with PlayStation.
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In general Xbox consoles as a center should be improved with Helix resting as the ideal convergence of Xbox PC and Console. For global it seems like the goal is to let Xbox PC OEMs do better at serving the brand in local regions (especially in regions where PC gaming is more common and publicly known).
Exclusives for now just seem to please existing fans, which isn’t bad but also isn’t great financially and increasingly becomes difficult to justify as they get more and more expensive to develop. I guess it’s on how long Xbox can properly justify that. Like I don’t think Microsoft’s financial goals will disappear, and seeing the “point” of an exclusive is hard if the end result is just less angry comments on Twitter and the same number of people buying consoles.
I mean the community fall off is just from Xbox not pushing their console in marketing for like 2 years. They haven’t really done anything to make the console experience worse than the cloud experience or PC experience (except maybe PC game pass bring cheaper). Pulling in new users (especially in new markets/form factors like cloud gaming) is expensive and difficult. I can get why Xbox chose to focus marketing on that, and I don’t get why people were responding as if it were a personal attack on them. There is value in a happy core console user base, but I don’t see how the gaming business is long (long) term sustainable if that comes at the cost of trying to expand users beyond the console market at all.
I am interested in how Xbox ultimately plays this (though now we probably won’t see their hand until 2027/2028), because we know they aren’t stealing console market share and a protective strategy is harder when you’re in third place and have always had the smallest number of console users.
I guess that’s why time exclusives are best for now. they don’t have to justify it to PlayStation or Nintendo gamers, they can still go with the case by case. Also, the games just haven’t produced on PlayStation, they were still down in the last financial report despite all the ports. I hate to say it, but the viral online chatter affects Xbox more than it’s competitors.
Well gaming is pretty fan centric so fans wanting something is important, remember 2013 how the Xbox almost died. I’m all for going multiplatform but there needs to be a unique differentiator to attract fans during the 360 they had all those online features and experiences that made Xbox the social hub not so much now. Games sometimes do embrace that relevant zeitgeist thing, games like GTA, Fortnite, COD do seem to embrace that experience, if only Xbox could expand in a community format.
I do not think the community fall of is from marketing, may be more from communicating and embracing the community. Xbox usually tends to always be doing something exciting for fans that make them feel close. The past 2 years it’s felt like a fight between the community and Xbox.
The thing now is what is Asha’s vision.
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There is more money to be made off an ecosystem than there is to be made publishing elsewhere.
Steam makes majority of its money off the storefront fee, this is where Sony and Nintendo make their money too.
Xbox has not found a new way to make money by making other consoles better at the expense of its own consumers.
They have made a fantastic move to try and expand through the PC space, albeit very late though.
If we’re talking about pure revenue, I mean they’re making over 20 billion now. Xbox revenue has dwarfed Nintendo since the Xbox One. Valve isn’t nearly as big. Being as large a publisher as they are and a platform has done Microsoft really well in terms of gaming revenue. Profit margins are another story, but a lot of the costs come from developing exclusives in a closed ecosystem and producing hardware.
Not sure what you mean by “expense of it’s own consumers”. I never understood this take. Xbox doesn’t take away games from me by porting them over to other platforms. My Xbox console experience also doesn’t lose any value when there’s more first and third party support (more games) than literally ever (including a lot of support from publishers that traditionally skipped Xbox). Arguably the live service Xbox first party games are more valuable because I can play them with more people.
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What is going to be the best outcome for Microsoft in the console space?
It is that they grow the market share to a point where they cannot be ignored when it comes to games. That smaller market share is an aspect that has traditionally made it very easy for Sony to get timed exclusivity on games.
It is almost as if people do not understand how the gaming market works. So, Microsoft is trying to get developers to develop code, using a unified system that allows for minimal work getting from PC versions to console versions, essentially killing the Sony moneyhat while also opening up the system to more players.
If they are selling their games on PlayStation, even after some time, there is zero incentive for those gamers to buy Xbox consoles. Remember, you are never going to make as much money off games you publish compared to the store tax, and this is including games like Call of Duty, Minecraft. Short term money, and no long term gain.
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Unless Sony produces the grandest of all fuck ups, let’s be real, the best Xbox can hope for is selling non-subsidised hardware in the 30-50 million region. Making it easier to develop an Xbox Helix version from a PC version is likely their best bet that other publishers will continue to port their games over, assuming it will be worthwhile cost/effort-wise to do so.
PlayStation owners were not buying Xbox consoles in big enough numbers before the multi-platform shift, so Xbox bringing back full exclusivity is a pipe dream that will likely cause more harm than good. The best bet is to continue releasing elsewhere and dominating those storefronts as we’ve seen them do recently, then negotiate better revenue splits on the biggest franchises, as Activision did for Call of Duty on every platform.
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The entire console market is not growing. Actually the entire console market is stagnating. New gamers would rather play on open platforms with more value like PC and Mobile.
Despite what the internet says, Xbox’s market share has been very stable. So has Sony and Nintendos. Growth at this point in the console market is purely coming from squeezing more money out of existing users.
For all the lack of incentive to buy Xbox consoles this gen, I’m just saying it’s real crazy that Xbox consoles (not PC, consoles) have gotten more developer support than any other generation including the Xbox 360. I’m also not worried in that department. Xbox does clearly want to unify their systems to grow even more, but that’s as much because the entire console market isn’t growing as it is anything else. We’re long past stealing market share from each other and we’re getting to the point where even the entire console market isn’t that big in the grand scheme of things and the lack of projected growth doesn’t bode well. Xbox can tell developers “Hey, build for our platform and you’ll simultaneously reach gamers across PC, Cloud, and Xbox Consoles.” and that has power.
So… what do you even want? No, Microsoft is definitely not taking COD and Minecraft from other platforms. THAT would be short term gain at the cost of long term success. Those games have literally grown because of their availability on all platforms. Take fortnite for example. Epic wouldn’t have the storefront platform they do now if they didn’t leverage Fortnite’s success and there’d be no success if fortnite was exclusive to PC or anything of the sort. Again, Microsoft Gaming makes more in revenue than Nintendo and Valve. Yes Valve makes all its money from owning a storefront, but Microsoft makes even more money by having a more diverse gaming business owning both a solid ecosystem (yes the current Xbox ecosystem is solid, not as strong as competitors but solid) and publishing some of the biggest most successful games period. Before Activision Blizzard was comparable in size to Nintendo in gaming revenue and it made more revenue than valve.
There’s zero incentive for anyone to buy consoles NOW. Exclusives aren’t saving the console market. They please existing customers and that’s all. Those customers (on PS and Xbox) don’t even actually care about exclusives because they spend all their time in third party games that are EVERYWHERE and they can play with their friends on all consoles. People currently are just upgrading for the most part and sticking with where their digital libraries are locked. The only reason we’re even talking about this is because of the “vibes”. Everyone in the industry has this data and knows what’s up. However the console market in particular is slow to change and holding on because existing gamers are incredibly protective. The argument of exclusives or not isn’t one involving growth, it’s one focused on keeping the existing community complacent and happy and hoping that the company is able to find other ways (like charging more) to deal with rising costs and less and less new console users.
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playstation released one of thier biggest games of the year on xbox two weeks ago. a platform releasing games to all audiences isn’t an xbox only thing.
Speaking of which, that game is largely being carried by Steam and it’s not even that crazy high like HD2. I got a bad feeling of what Sony is thinking next.
Hey PlayStation did create Concord