Does Xbox need a new direction? (pic: Microsoft)
A reader predicts that Microsoft can only beat PlayStation if they stop making hardware and concentrate on just being a publisher.
For a company that has $69 billion to spend on buying the biggest third party publisher in the world, Microsoft really do seem to be up against it recently. Although the Activision Blizzard deal probably will go through, they’ve had to give away so many concessions most gamers will barely notice any change once it happens. Then there’s all the talk about poor management at Xbox, underperforming games, and the rather obvious problem that the only decent title they’ve released in what seems like forever is Forza Horizon 5 two years ago.
In trying to get its way with monopoly investigators, Microsoft has portrayed itself as the plucky underdog, which is of course ridiculous for one of the world’s biggest companies. And yet you can kind of see what they mean. Nothing they ever do seems to work. Even their most popular console came last in its generation, and they’ve burnt through all their franchises so that the only thing they have left that anyone cares about now is Forza – and most of the developers for that recently left.
The Xbox Series S is amazing value for money but it’s still being massively outsold by the PlayStation 5. Even Game Pass isn’t the runaway success they obviously hoped it would be, with constant questions about whether it’s disincentivising people to buy games and if not enough people are signing up for it. This week there were claims that even their shadow drop of Hi-Fi Rush was a flop and while they denied it… what else were they going to say?
Halo is in disarray, with seemingly everyone but the cleaning staff having left, and it’s beginning to feel like Bethesda is their only developer that can actually get games out and finished. Microsoft owns plenty of studios now but none of them are producing anything and it’s still looking like most of them are years away from doing so.
It seems almost impossible that a company this rich and powerful can be in such disarray, but I can only assume that it’s the execs in charge and that maybe Phil Spencer isn’t quite the hot shot boss he likes to pretend.
The central problem that Microsoft never really seems to have accepted is that exclusives sell consoles. Most people buy a console to play a particular game, or at least a small number of specific games they have in mind. That’s why the PlayStation 4 and 5 have been so successful and it’s also why Nintendo is still going despite having several failed consoles over the years.
People used to buy an Xbox and Xbox 360 for Halo, but Microsoft never really had anything else, except the relatively similar Gears Of War. Now both those franchises are old hat and they’ve not been replaced with anything, except… Call Of Duty, maybe?
In the time it will take for Microsoft to get into a position where they have a good line-up of varied first party games this generation will be long gone and by that point I really don’t see Microsoft’s stockholders having the patience to keeping doing things the way they have for the last 20 years.
Unless they change their gameplan. If they’re going to buy Activision Blizzard, then why not just make Xbox exactly what Activision Blizzard is right now but with all Microsoft’s other game studios added on? Forget the hardware and the competing with Sony, just publish games on PlayStation 5 and be done with it. What difference would it make?
EA and Ubisoft already have their own subscription services and Xbox could totally do that too, and probably a lot better, with streaming as a major option. They could finally become the Netflix of gaming but on PlayStation 5 and PC. People always say Nintendo would never go third party because the design of their consoles and hardware is so intertwined with the games themselves, and I get that. But that’s not true of the Xbox (or PlayStation).
There is no important difference between the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and in terms of player experience it wouldn’t make any difference if you could just play Halo on PlayStation. Heck, Microsoft’s biggest seller is Minecraft and that’s a franchise that is least popular on Xbox consoles.
I strongly suspect that these are things that have already occurred to Phil Spencer and that while he’d probably like to keep making consoles, he’d actually be more than happy to jettison them and just become a third party publisher. Only Xbox would be the biggest by far and able to throw their weight around in a way they never really have as a console manufacturer.
Microsoft will give it to the end of this generation and see how the next one starts off, but if it’s business as usual I predict they’ll be software only by the time the PlayStation 7 swings around.
By reader Akuma64
Should Xbox be more like Activision than PlayStation? (pic: Microsoft)
The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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A reader predicts that Microsoft can only beat PlayStation if they stop making hardware and concentrate on just being a publisher.