Xbox does what Sony don’t? (Picture: AP Images for Xbox)
A reader suggests that the reason the Xbox Games Showcase was so successful is because it was as much like a PlayStation event as possible.
There are many reasons to think that being a loyal fanboy to a single company is a bad idea but one of the most obvious is that everything these publishers tell you is a lie. They are not in the business of creating art or making their customers happy, they are there to make money for their shareholders and absolutely nothing else.
As a case in point, for years Microsoft has been downplaying the importance of first party exclusives and attempting to run Xbox as differently as possible to Sony, with their emphasis on multiplayer games and Game Pass subscriptions. And yet last weekend the Xbox Games Showcase was a huge success, precisely because Microsoft were as much like Sony as possible.
Switch the games round to PlayStation exclusives and the whole thing could’ve been a Sony showcase from any year in the last decade. From the use of montages to the limited amount of screentime for execs, as well as the constant mic drops for major third party game announcements, the whole thing was reusing the Sony formula for showcases to the letter – and that was why it was such a success.
Before you start trying to work out my biases here, I’d like to think that I don’t have any. I own both a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and, like any sensible person, I think the Xbox has been a complete waste of time so far and that the PlayStation 5 has been headed in exactly the same direction over the last year or so (is that because of Activision Blizzard? I don’t know).
Almost all of my gaming entertainment in the last 18 months has come from third party and Switch games, which is fine but obviously disappointing given how much I’ve shelled out for the consoles. Since they’re both almost identical in terms of hardware the difference is in the exclusive games, which explains why the PlayStation 5 has been so dominant.
But Microsoft has tried to deny the importance of first party games ever since it shot itself in the foot at the end of the Xbox 360 era and lost most of its big studios.
Obviously, they’ve bought a lot recently but they’ve never been able to leverage them until now when suddenly, wouldn’t you know it, it turns out exclusives are suddenly the most important thing in gaming again.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad, because I think that’s the best way to do things, but it means everything that Microsoft has said about games and exclusives over the last two generations has been a lie, to try and hide the fact that they knew they didn’t have the games people wanted. But now they do.
And I say good luck to them. I liked the look of Starfield, Clockwork Revolution, and Fable, and possibly others.
That’s all they needed to renew my enthusiasm for Xbox, and I suspect all they’ll need to get others interested in buying into it. It’s strange that console manufacturers constantly have to be reminded that people buy their hardware to play games, not buy into their insidious ecosystems.
Thankfully, Xbox has finally remembered and have demonstrated that fact by beating Sony at their own game.
By reader 84Colbat
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A reader suggests that the reason the Xbox Games Showcase was so successful is because it was as much like a PlayStation event as possible.