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Xbox's biggest crisis right now isn't games. It's hardware. (Opinion - Jez Corden)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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It's ironic and somewhat revolting to see the behemoth that is Microsoft crying that it can't compete and it needs to acquire other publishers, when it already has a collection of studios and franchises, means to fund brand new studios and make even better hardware. If they aren't competitive now, it's because of their own bad decisions.
Although it seems that despite their hardware not being as popular, they seem to sell GamePass for PC at least decently.
Can’t compete… because Sony is paying publishers to make games exclusive for the PS5.
As a PC gamer at heart exclusives suck.
Over the years I almost bought a console on a few occasions due to exclusives, or games shipping first on console.
Red Dead Redemption and GTA IV, then GTA V.
By the time RDR2 came out I had bought an Xbox One S - because it was the cheapest 4K BD player on the market.
Oh, the irony. Still haven’t bought a 4K BD. Prices were ridiculous. Probably still are. Found that 4K streaming titles on Apple TV were so good I didn’t need better than that.
But since stumbling into the One S led me to buy RDR2 on release day.
Halfway through I upgraded to the One X, and when Series X came out I had it less than a month later after putting in a pre-order about a month before release.
A colleague who pre-ordered PS5 six months before I even thought about the Series X had to wait 7 months from release for his.
I agree that exclusives suck, but acquisitions are worse in every way. At least with a deal you can hope that eventually the game will be out for everything, or the next one will. Now if anyone hopes to get a Bethesda game on other consoles again, they are out of luck.
But also, if first-party XBox games were more appealing they wouldn't be in this situation. Sony can't lock Nintendo out of the market because people want Mario and Zelda anyway.
Nintendo does their own thing, “always”* has, and is hardly relevant in this discussion.
What astonishes me is that paying for exclusivity in what is, in practice, a two player market isn’t considered anti-trust.
And yes, with “paying for exclusivity” I do mean both Sony’s approach and Microsoft’s acquisition-based approach.
* : Eg. everyone who was a Nintendo switch also has something else, unless they’re < 12 years old.
And yet Sony's Horizon series has been overshadowed by Zelda.
Only hardcore gamers, who make up for a small part of the market, believe that Nintendo somehow doesn't count as far as how this market competes. That somehow it's a separate market because the specs aren't comparable. That's not how it works at all. The entertainment budget being fought over is the same.
In any case, all this is a separate matter. The point is that aside from Microsoft, the other console makers manage to attract buyers through first-party games. Same goes for Sony. A lot of people bought Playstations for God of War and Last of Us.
Of course they did, but the world be so much better if games were available for all platforms and the platforms competed on the merits of their hardware and software instead of the merits of their exclusive titles.
Switch is the third best selling console of all time behind the PS2 and the DS. I highly doubt that most people who own switch own something else. What you're saying applies maybe to the core gamer audience, which is honestly pretty small.
In fact, the issue is that Xbox "never"* has done it's own thing, and because of that they are hardly relevant in the console market.
*their entire branding is "gaming box for gamers". The only time they strayed from this was with xbox one where they for some reason decided a "DVR that can also play games" was the way to go.