6mo ago

Xbox’s ‘Exclusive’ Video Game Strategy Leaves Everyone Confused

www.bloomberg.com Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

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. It has laid off thousands of staff, shuttered studios and been unable to articulate a consistent message about how it plans to release games. Xbox fans assumed those big acquisitions would lead to more exclusive games that helped justify their console purchase, but the opposite has happened.

Early this year, Microsoft began putting some of its former exclusives on PlayStation, starting with smaller, older titles such as Hi-Fi Rush. This week, the company announced that another big, new title will follow the same route. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, coming in December to Xbox and PC, will arrive on PlayStation in the spring of 2025.

Ditching console exclusives is good news for players who can only afford to stick to one piece of hardware. And Microsoft was able to squeeze the Activision deal past regulatory scrutiny in part because it promised to continue releasing Call of Duty on PlayStation. But Xbox’s release strategy has been so confusing, it requires a massive spreadsheet and a full-time job to keep track of it all.

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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.
- I am more inclined to think they are just selling to other platforms because they have to after dropping so much money on Activision, Bethesda, and trying to keep games pass a decent value proposition.
  Granted, I think selling multi platform is a good move and I hope they stick with it, but I think the PS5 is trouncing the Xbox enough worldwide that even without a whole lot of first party games, PlayStation has no real obligation to throw Xbox any bones in kind. PC ports seem to be enough.
  
  They're fucking Microsoft. Why would they "have to?" Only Nintendo has a bigger war-chest, and Nintendo's been sitting on it for a hundred years.
  PlayStation has no real obligation to throw Xbox any bones in kind.
  Serious question: does that matter?
  ... are PC ports not also 'throwing Microsoft a bone?'
- "The more you tighten your grip, the more ~~star systems~~ customers slip through your fingers."

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.
- basically specifically for AAA titles, development cost for them are soo astronomically high that the console platform isnt enough to support them alone (imo) both Sony and Microsoft basically have to decide to either scale back complexity of games (like what Nintendo would do) or release it to more platforms because 1 device platform is no longer enough for some titles.
  Sony decides to port to PC, (and so does 3rd party companies like Square Enix and capcom who realize the need), while Microsoft is taking the subscription route which bolters both their cloud infrastructure numbers, and provides a subscriber count which investors like because subscriptions are content quarterly flow of money rather than peaks and drops based on game release.
  
  Nintendo is already telling their investors to expect development costs to go up substantially. Part of the reason why their games were so much cheaper for so long is because there's not enough horsepower on their console to bother with the extra fidelity that requires more labor to make.
- They've been making Windows look more and more like a console OS for years, so I've been expecting something like this

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.
- You're calling Jason Schrier, a dumb author. He is one of, if not the most respected games journalists in the industry. You might want to take a moment and consider his words.
  For my part, I do well enough that I could easily afford a good PC and 2-3 consoles per generation, and I've bought an Xbox and PlayStation since the start of both product lines. My Xbox One S was by far my least utilized console, to the point where I just couldn't justify buying one in the current generation.
  I just don't know who the Xbox is even FOR anymore. If they put out a good exclusive, I'll think about getting it... on PC, but even then, that's probably money going to Steam or even EGS, because fuck the Windows Store, and most of the time I don't even bother buying it there because something else on PC or PS5/PS Plus has caught my eye and I don't feel enough FOMO to go back looking for it.
  I should be one of Xbox's core customers. But they stopped giving me the time of day when they spent an entire E3 blathering on about being a media console back in 2013. They've done precious little to try to win me back in the decade since.
  
  You’re calling Jason Schrier, a dumb author. He is one of, if not the most respected games journalists in the industry.
  But he's also the "Switch Pro tonight" guy.
  
  Fine, it's a dumb article by an author who had a temporary moment of dumbness while they were writing it, but might not be completely dumb all the time.
  Who is the Xbox for? People who want a console to play video games. Like wtf are you even talking about? You, like the author, are just falling for console war nonsense where somehow having a dedicated living room video game machine needs to be justified by someone else not getting to play a game.
- It's baffling because usually companies have to be forced to give up monopolies by the government
  
  Like I know that's baffling in a satirical way, but this article does not seem aware of the corporate villainy satire and just seems to be corpo pilled and fully bought into the idea that Xbox is somehow worse when it's games come out on PlayStation.
  I've long bought Xboxes because I prefer their controller and software, I do not give a flying fuck if their games come out on PlayStation. Games that are exclusive without an underlying hardware reason (like motion controls), should be illegal, but I'm not going to be a console wars dipshit and demand that PlayStation players don't get to play Microsoft game just because Xbox players don't get to play Sony games.
- This is a dumb article by a dumb author.
  checks author lmao, okay bud.

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