Halo used to be a killer app (pic: Microsoft)
A reader suggests Microsoft’s current problems are due to trying to rush their way to success and not learning from Nintendo and Sony.
So it’s been a hebdomas horribilis (horrible week, I looked it up) for Xbox and I’m not sure I’ve really got much sympathy for them. I originally didn’t have any issue with them buying Activision Blizzard and yet I’ve become more negative about it simply because of the skeevy way they’ve tried to justify the deal, with this ridiculous 150 million number and making all these deals with cloud gaming companies no one has ever heard of.
When you’re acting that sketchy it becomes hard to take anything you say seriously, and the CMA seem to have seen right through them. Although Microsoft were already implying they don’t know what they’re talking about before they made the decision, so I’m not sure whether whatever lawyers they’re using actually know their stuff or not.
I’m not really here to talk about the Activision Blizzard acquisition though, so much as I am the situation Microsoft now finds themselves in. There’s now a good chance they won’t be able to buy Activision Blizzard, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to the $69 billion they’d put aside for it. Will Phil Spencer be able to spend it on other companies? Perhaps. Will he be allowed to start up his own first party studios using it? He should be able to, but I assume he won’t or he would’ve just done that in the first place.
$69 billion is an absurd amount of money to spend on a company that only has three or four franchises of any consequence, any one of which could easily see a fall in popularity before the 10 years are up, that Microsoft has to keep everything multiformat. It seems to me that there’s an infinite number of better ways they could use that money.
Let me use a movie analogy here. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was a massive success because they slowly built up their foundations with individual films, some of which were good and some of which weren’t, growing in confidence and quality until they topped it all off with the biggest movie of all time. Their rivals, the DC Universe, never had the patience for all that legwork and just tried to fast-forward things to their equivalent of the Avengers, with the Justice League – which was a massive flop.
DC, owned by Warner Bros., never seemed to really learn their lesson though and just carried on regardless until they finally ran out of steam and got someone new in to take over the reins. As I hope you see, Xbox is Warner Bros. in this analogy.
Microsoft want to be as successful as Sony is with games but they don’t seem to recognise that Sony’s first party output really didn’t get into top gear until the PlayStation 4. Everything before that was either made by someone they didn’t own or just wasn’t very good.
It takes time to build up talented studios and they have to be given space to fail along the way, but Xbox either doesn’t understand that or doesn’t have the patience. Nintendo didn’t get to be where they are straight away. The genius of Shigeru Miyamoto meant they had great games straight off the bat, but they also put out a lot of rubbish on the NES and even SNES.
Sony understands that and I feel that, although they’d never admit, they’ve been taking notes from Nintendo all along, and have slowly been building up their first party studios to their current state. All Microsoft keeps doing is buying new companies and not getting anything out of them. While the few they already had, that by this point should have matured into something great, are somehow getting worse. Unless you think 343 are doing a good job with Halo?
People buy consoles to play games. Not just any game but specific ones. You don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I think I’ll spend hundreds on an Xbox Series X to play whatever random game happens to be on Game Pass this month. You buy one to play Zelda, or God Of War, or Forza. Microsoft just doesn’t have that sort of killer app and yet in the Xbox 360 era Halo and Gears Of War were two of the biggest names around… now though they’ve faded away almost into irrelevance.
It is more than a decade since those glory days and yet no franchise, except perhaps Forza Horizon, has replaced them and one of Xbox’s big hopes now is a reboot of the already mediocre Fable. Xbox needs to understand that games are all that matters and the way to convince people to buy your console is high quality exclusive games, not unsustainable subscription services and bragging about superior graphics, which never gets proven by any of their games.
The fact that both the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S lack them is exactly the reason they’re so behind and, in my opinion, they’re going to stay that way until they learn these lessons that they should’ve been aware of decades ago.
By reader Taylor Moon
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A reader suggests Microsoft’s current problems are due to trying to rush their way to success and not learning from Nintendo and Sony.