Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with how much money Xbox makes as whole, since they are financially well.
Name one thing in common with Linux users and Xbox players. Yeah, that’s right, this “<current year> is the year of Linux Desktop/Xbox gets better“. And it seems that 2024 isn’t the year for Xbox at least.
Number 3 in console sales, crazy amounts of decisions, almost no new hardware releases that excite people, lackluster games, lack of actual first-party games and the ones that exist aren’t particularly good, and plenty of money thrown at marketing campaigns that ultimately show that remain out of touch with the market, Xbox feels like a sinking ship who is about to gonna have to decide what will be its future.
Now, they want to make like they are mixture of first and third-party, with the “This is an Xbox” marketing campaigns. But you can see what Sony and Nintendo aren’t doing these, and they are successful. What went wrong? The problem I see with that is they don’t understand that gaming as a whole is a thing that takes more time than money, time to produce a game and to enjoy it. But since time is money and MS is burning it quickly, it’s not a surprise they are this way. Buy studio or publisher, publish a few games that review somewhat okay, shut down studios, rinse and repeat.
Option A: First Party
Many people, including people from Xbox itself, have said that the company is software-first, hardware-second. And it shows because they acquired a lot of studios to make games. Yet, there’s almost nothing new to show, other than the regular and expected titles, like Call of Duty.
So why not drop console development and focus fully on making games for every console out there? Since designing consoles is costly, dropping it would be wise. But they can’t. The original plan of Xbox was approved to be ‘getting a box with MS logos inside of every home’, which is much more approachable than having a PC inside of every home, since PCs are much more expensive than consoles, in most cases.
So they are stuck with having to make new generations of consoles just because they want to get the box inside of people’s homes. But as numbers around the Internet say, they are failing at that. The new marketing is an attempt to fix that but only with a twist that they don’t sell consoles for some reason.
Option B: Third Party
This is what I feel that Xbox wants to be. After buying a lot of studios over the decade, they have little to show however, so it’s not a good idea to make that sort of business.
With Xbox GamePass, they can claim that it’s a good offer for those that want to get into the action right away, but it also blends with the dumb ideas sold to VCs, the idea that the future is to have eternal revenue by having a paid subscription. Sure, you get money constantly instead of once, but that means that if anything happens to the company, the service just dies off and what you paid for vanishes or becomes a paperweight.
Which comes back to Xbox GamePass and their promise of keep making games for it, what will happen when MS takes down the service? People should think more about that, and they aren’t. Recently, they increased prices, and also reported that no growth, meaning that people are no longer getting into this scheme. If it goes the way of Juicero, then we’ll know it was a bad idea from the start.
Another thing that makes it difficult for them to assume the fully third-party moniker is that you need good games (read: financially successful) to keep yourself afloat. As long you keep pushing out banger after banger, you’ll survive as a third-party. But take a look at the recent MS-only catalogue. Forza Horizon 5 is seen as a downgrade, despite the glowing reviews. Where’s Gears of War 6? Fable reboot is still being made. Halo Infinite flopped hard. (In addition, they rebranded 343 Industries into ‘Halo Studios’ to onlymake Halo games and never allow the company to breathe a bit.) Forza Motorsport (8) is also a disaster, one of the worst racing games in recent years. Xbox spend over 8 billion dollars to buy Zenimax Media, owners of Bethesda Game Studios to get Starfield away from PlayStation, and the game is considered one of the worse titles they put out, and while it reviewed mostly positively, it’s hard to believe it came out over a year ago.
These games show that MS has a lot of groundwork to do to get to a comfortable third-party position.
Fixing the Sinking Ship
Now, what can they do to fix this? Well, it’s obvious, they haveto pick oneroad to continue. If they keep stretching themselves thin like this, the company is gonna lose even more than their reputation, it’s gonna bleed money.
If we go by any indication, Xbox is going 70% third party and 30% first party. This is because they don’t sell enough consoles (read: bad exclusivity player) to make first party viable. If they make a banger of a game, they might be able to get away with selling some consoles, but that also means they’ll drop the addressable market of other consoles, which for many, it’s called ‘lost money’.
Ultimately, I think that the problem with Xbox is its lackluster leadership. Sony Interactive Entertainment had many CEOs in the recent years, and they managed to get the company back to a correct path, mostly. But in the 10+ years of Phil Spencer heading Xbox, we saw the company losing reputation with gamers, and lose a lot of market share, as well extravagant acquisitions, like Zenimax, ABK, Interplay, so on. And for what? Games that don’t sell consoles, because they aren’t the first thing that you think when you think Xbox. And of course, making releases on PC devalued the brand even more, since you can spend more on parts that won’t go to Microsoft and get their games working without issues, not that they don’t have some anyway.
And what they should do? Get rid of this terrible leadership, and strength their leadership with people that have worked in the industry and understand how to fix a sinking ship.
The next step, I feel, is to determine which way they are going to go. First party? Then cancel all ports to other consoles, even stuff like Minecraft. Wanna play it? Buy an Xbox. Third party? Then cancel all console plans and keep on making stuff on the Cloud and ports to other consoles.
This half-half solution only makes the brand look super weak, because you’re selling consoles but your first-party games are in other consoles or PC, so what’s the point of buying the console? PC gamers wait years for console ports to come, and waited for a few years for some EGS ‘exclusives’, having time exclusivity doesn’t work if you’re making a first-party game.
Having people to be inconvenienced is not a bad thing, sometimes. Xbox has tried to save its tarnished image in 2013 by making sure that everything could be an Xbox. But during that, they made (and still make!) many missteps, dumb acquisitions and generally have been being poorly managed. It’s not a surprise that they are being like this, trying to get people to play their games on platforms they compete against, because, otherwise, how else would you play them? No one is buying an Xbox anymore, and the people that make Xbox apparently accepted that fact.