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.
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.
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.
You are sprinting to the defense of a multi-billion dollar company to call me a console war partisan. That is some American-politics level projection right there. I was a Sega kid. We lost the console war at the turn of the century. Now I go where the games are.
If the Xbox is a console for people to play games, it’s not the only console on the market, so it needs to compete. If it gains feature parity with its direct competition…except that said competition has a quality stable of exclusive titles, then the console is going to struggle. Like say, moving 20% of the volume that their competitor does. Microsoft’s answer to this seems to be to forego adding the value of console exclusives to their own platform and instead releasing more of their first-party titles on Playstation and PC.
That’s good for gamers, yes. It also flies in the face of any attempt to develop the Xbox as a platform choice. If I can afford one console per generation, why would I choose the Xbox over a Playstation? If I can afford multiple consoles, what does the Xbox offer that I don’t get already with the Playstation?