I wonder what took them so long to make a response. The community was turning against them and they took an entire week to tell them that no, they do, in fact, want to keep making video game consoles.
Nothing announced in the video is ground-breaking, nor did it require so much time to prepare.
(Honestly, Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush going multiplatform in place of Starfield is a huge win for PlayStation users lol)
The point is, Xbox is performing very badly, with the latest metrics suggesting not only that PS5 blew them out of the water, but also that XSeries is selling less than its predecessor. Coupled with rumors about exclusives going multiplatform, people feared that it meant that MS didnโt have enough faith in the brand to keep going, and that Xbox would end like Windows Phone.
The concern was real and, in my opinion, perfectly justified. MS telling them to wait a week for an answer, without dismissing the rumors was the weird part. They saw the community on fire and said, โThis is fineโ. All-around incompetence.
Those games are already available on PC, nobody was freaking out about that. People were wary of MS exclusives being ported to other console platforms.
Consoles live and die by exclusives. Porting those over suggests a lack of faith in the brand and would be like admitting defeat. It wasnโt clickbait rage journos baiting people, it was people reading the room and realising that the Xbox brand wasnโt as strong as they thought.
You donโt need to defend exclusives or become part of a cult to understand how the market works.
Exclusives are a big part of what makes a console successful (not the only one, mind you, but they certainly play a role in convincing people to buy a console), and porting them over to the competing console would be like admitting defeat for MS.
Although fanboys certainly exist (on both sides), a lot of people werenโt being cultish. They were simply concerned for the future of Xbox and re-evaluating their choice: why buy a console, when I can buy the competition and play all its games plus other exclusive titles? Why invest in a digital library if thereโs no guarantee that the platform will keep existing?
So being scared that Xbox is going to disappear is stupid, the consoles might, but Microsoft has been transforming Xbox into a platform for years, starting with the release of windows 7 when they introduced XboxLive for windows alongside halo 2.
If Xbox disappears, so does your digital library and other purchases (some games you can buy once and get on PC as well, but last time I checked, they were few and far in between). I can see that being a concern for people that bought into the Xbox ecosystem for the last few gens.