Cliff Notes – Xbox has never understood the importance of first party games
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Microsoft has consistently failed to nurture its first-party franchises, leading to the decline of iconic titles like Halo and Fable, which have not seen adequate new entries or revitalisation.
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The company’s reliance on third-party titles during the Xbox 360 era has resulted in a lack of exclusive, critically acclaimed games, undermining its position in the console market.
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As Xbox approaches its 25th anniversary, it faces significant challenges due to a limited portfolio of successful franchises, exacerbated by recent missteps such as the Game Pass price cut and management issues.
Xbox has never understood the importance of first party games – Reader’s Feature
It won’t be long until Halo appears on PS5 (Xbox Game Studios)
As Xbox faces its biggest backlash ever, a reader argues that it is has never fully understand what’s needed to be a successful console publisher.
I’m not sure what Microsoft was expecting from their Game Pass price cut annoucement this week but I’m going to guess it wasn’t the total destruction of the entire Xbox name. It feels like things have been falling apart for them since at least the Xbox One era and I don’t think I’m alone in having less and less sympathy for them as time has gone by.
A big part of that problem is Phil Spencer, who should’ve gone years ago, but really the rot set in during the Xbox 360 days (when he was already there, which people seem to forget). Xbox has made many different mistakes over the years, but the one consistent one is that it doesn’t respect the fact that the most important thing in being a games company is the games – and the people that make them.
GC pointed out, in their article on the disaster, that Sony and Nintendo have never laid off developers in their thousands the way Microsoft has. They know they’re the lifeblood of their company, but they also know the importance of keeping their franchises alive and constantly reinventing them. This, I feel, is the one important lesson Microsoft has never understood.
The original Xbox might have only been around for a few years, but it had a lot of important console exclusives. Halo, of course, but also Fable, Forza Motorsport, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, and Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, Splinter Cell, and Ninja Gaiden. That’s actually a lot better line-up than most people give it credit for, but Microsoft either let them immediately go multiformat or have badly handled the franchises.
Halo was the biggest thing around on Xbox 360 but went to seed as soon as Bungie left. Forza Horizon is now probably Xbox’s biggest franchise but apart from being multiformat Microsoft never seems to promote it as much as they should, as if they don’t even recognise what they’ve got. But the others? They all went multiformat and/or just died off, with Microsoft doing nothing to nurture them.
And that’s the important word: nurture. That’s the job of a publisher, you’ve got to make sure a franchise gets new entries. but you’ve also got to make sure they add enough to stop it getting old. Maybe you do spin-offs as well, but who makes them and will they seem relevant compared to the main games?
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
The Xbox 360 is always seen as the best of the consoles, but I think the quality of the first party games has been exaggerated over time. The Xbox 360 had lots of great games but very few were only on Xbox, and that I think is the beginning of all the problems.
What’s your favourite game on Xbox 360? Batman: Arkham City, maybe? Dark Souls? Mass Effect 2? Bioshock? Skyrim? GTA 5? Call Of Duty 4? Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag? Far Cry 3? None of those had anything to do with Microsoft. In fact, they had Mass Effect 1 as an exclusive and then lost it.
At the time Microsoft seemed to think they’d cracked it, that because they were on top at the time they always would be and that they didn’t need to make games themselves, they just needed to attract other publishers.
They had Gears Of War as an exclusive, which worked for them, but when they bought that, at the end of the Xbox 360 era, it went to hell too because the developer changed.
Microsoft had other first party games on Xbox 360, but let them all die off without seeming to care. Kameo, Project Gotham Racing, Perfect Dark, Viva Piñata, Shadowrun, Banjo-Kazooie… none of them made it to the Xbox One. Not even Fable did, and we still don’t even have a date on that promised revival.
Microsoft just didn’t care or didn’t know how to keep any of it going and when they shot themselves in the foot with the obsession with Kinect everything started to fall apart even quicker. For years we’ve been hearing about incompetent management at Xbox developers, and you don’t need any insider information to know that, just look at the evidence.
The absolute state of Halo Studios is proof alone that not only do Microsoft not know what they’re doing but they don’t even seem to understand they have a problem.
Xbox will be 25 years old next year but for being around that long they have got a really tiny collection of games that are both big sellers and critical hits. That, in my opinion, is why Xbox continues to fail so badly and why now that they don’t have any exclusives the whole brand is falling apart.
As a concept, Xbox is a very hollow thing. You take away the console from Nintendo or Sony and they’ve got tons of world-beating, popular franchises. You take it away from Xbox and you’ve got virtually nothing that anyone cares about. Cheap Game Pass was about all they had going for them and now that there’s not even that it feels like it’s game over.
By reader PhantomZ
Gears Of War is no longer exclusive (Xbox Game Studios)
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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