Games

Microsoft is winning a war Sony doesn't know they're in. They've all but destroyed the concept of exclusivity. Everything is a computer now. Games are multiplatform by default. Turns out - more sales means more money. Why wouldn't Sekiro be on PC, or Halo be on PS5? Just so people can feel special about which brand they bought?

The Xbox has always been an agenda more than a platform.

Yeah, Xboxen have been outsold by Playstations at every step, but in so doing they've dragged Playstation hardware into lockstep with their machines. The literally-a-PC Xbox-the-first tricked Sony into bundling the PS3 with a then-expensive hard drive, and Sony barely got the memo in time to give it a video card. PS3 ports still sucked for years while the 360 had CryTek running 1:1 devkit demos. And then, yes, the PS3 came from behind on system and game sales, but not in any way that vindicated the ways it was weird versus the ways the 360 was weird. Microsoft choosing PowerPC was unthinkable... but they proved it didn't matter. And then - the PS4 and Xbone were basically the same. Only dumb software and worse camera optics gave the PS4 a leg-up that it never lost. Both machines got about the same upgrades at about the same time. They even looked about the same. Do you want your console in bold, or italic?

And now - the practical difference between Microsoft's glorified AMD laptop and Sony's glorified AMD laptop is negligible. It only affects which color boxes you buy. Fanboys have been crying "Playstation has no games!" since the PS3 era, and what they mean is, "all the Xbox kids can also play these games, waah."

Sony loves that attitude. Sony wanted 1996 to last forever - back when games came out for a machine. The games the PS1 didn't get, didn't matter, because Sony could show off whatever the N64 and Saturn didn't get. (Which, for the PS1 and PS2, was admittedly quite a lot of whatever.) They were still doing it for MGS4 and Uncharted and so on. They're still kinda doing it for God Of War. (No, the other one.) But around the time the PS2 was printing money, this little game called "Grand Theft Auto 3" released a basically identical port on PC. And then their machine got basically identical ports of Quake- and Unreal-engine games. And by the time EA purchased and strangled RenderWare, the whole damn industry had seen the mountain of cash waiting for anyone who built the same game once for two audiences.

Nintendo, of all companies, caught onto this. Their rebranded Android tablet flies off shelves because existing games just kinda work. Slowly. (But I would be zero percent surprised if big-boy GPUs adopted hardware ASTC.)

Sony finally got their head around it with Helldivers 2. As with Microsoft publishing on PS5, Sony's sudden PSN demands don't make sense, unless you look further out. Helldivers showed Sony how much money they could make if they were just a PC publisher - and it scared the shit out of them. They need a platform, to stay relevant. Nintendo has world-class design and mythically popular characters. Microsoft-- is fucking Microsoft. Sony's not even having a great time as a music and movie company. If they have to be a games company, instead of owning a whole-ass platform, it's a fundamental loss of power. So getting dead serious about their ecosystem, to the point of pissing off millions of existing customers, is an effort to maintain that grip.

Microsoft treating them as just another machine, instead of a lockstep rival, seems like a strong countermove. They're not losing money on Xbox, or games, or subscriptions. But they're willing to burn through entire studios in pursuit of much larger goals. They don't want to win a fair fight. Competition is for the little fish. So at this point, they might end the console war, by simply not participating.

Or maybe they're just idiots. I mean, it's Microsoft. They've fumbled bags larger than this one.

Worked for Blizzard before all the Xbox layoffs... The confusing actions are mainly because the gaming division is now it's own company within Microsoft and responsible for its budget and making revenue for the first time in XBOX's history. The leadership level all got promotions and new titles, they shared new org charts to everyone, and then the layoffs and closures began almost immediately. It's no longer about making their user base grow but about making money so expect their games everywhere and to see Game Pass lose features and raise prices.

These rollouts make little sense. Perhaps the company is still trying to straddle the line between reaching as many players as possible and burning fans who bought Xbox hardware under the belief that they would not be able to get those games elsewhere.

I think that's exactly it.

In 2017, I wrote on Twitter that Xbox had clearly lost the hardware war to PlayStation and should consider transforming its consoles into living room PCs with open operating systems that could run any computer game. As the company behind the Windows operating system, Microsoft is in a unique position to sell machines that combine the convenience and affordability of consoles with the flexibility of PCs.

I think that's exactly what they're going to do in the next 2-4 years. It's just about the only way to satisfy all of the things that they're promising or hinting at in public statements, especially coupled with what they've been saying about handhelds in a world where the Steam Deck exists.

I too thought that when they spent $70B on Activision that they'd be using that to bolster their roster of exclusives, but perhaps the economic reality of AAA game development has just finally hit that tipping point where exclusives don't make sense anymore. Sony sure seems to think so. They've got the runaway dominating high end console; they still feel the need to put out games on PC, and despite their best efforts, they can't yet get people to move on from PS4.

It's not that confusing. The Activision deal almost didn't happen following all of the scrutiny Microsoft received from their earlier buying of Bethesda and making all of their new games Xbox exclusives. They squeaked by and sealed the deal in the end, but presumably they don't want Activision to be their last acquisition ever. To that end, they're third-partying some of their high-profile-but-probably-not-big-earner games so that when some regulatory agency tries to make that same argument for their next big purchase, they can point at the few titles they published on other consoles as proof that they promise not to be anticompetitive.

It's simple. Chase money.

But since closing the Activision deal last fall, Xbox has made a series of moves that have left fans and analysts baffled about its overall strategy.

[citation needed]

This is a dumb article by a dumb author. There is nothing baffling about a video game publisher, publishing video games.

Oh no it doesn't fit into a simple black and white, Xbox vs Playstation, narrative, that must make it baffling 🤔🤨🤔🤔🤨🤔🤨🤔🤨🤔.

Like Jesus Christ, grow the fuck up.

Console exclusives are inherently an example of market distortion and illegal anti-competitive tying. Stop acting confused when a company behaves normally. Sony music songs still come out on Apple Music, that is the norm for virtually every competitive business around the world. Stop treating video games differently.