As a gamer who has owned every Xbox from the OG to a Xbox One S, I just don’t understand Microsoft’s strategy for this generation. Vanishingly few console exclusives, and most of those shipped on PC, too. As someone with a decent PC and enough income to buy 2-3 consoles per gen, they just haven’t given me a reason to buy an Xbox Series console.
I know they hoped to sell Game Pass to PC only players, but without the lock-in of a console, there’s just no incentive to buy it over a PS Plus subscription and individually buying the exclusives I want on PC.
Now they’re burning bridges with players by closing down beloved developers, even if their last title was successful. I wonder what Ninja Theory devs are thinking with Hellblade 2 a couple weeks out.
But it turns out that there’s not a whole lot of reason to get Game Pass if the games suck, and if you want to play a game long term, you’re better off buying it once on Steam instead of paying a subscription.
And X Cloud still sucks ass.
They have no decent exclusives, and their purchase of Bethesda didn’t pay off because Redfall and Starfield sucked ass.
They wasted billions on Activision Blizzard, which it seems like was entirely for the WoW and CoD IPs, and now they’re shutting other studios they scooped up with Bethesda which was purchased for the Fallout and Elder Scrolls IP.
They’re trying to score exclusive IPs for the next gen to get people stuck in their ecosystem.
Well of course not. These game studios were selling games at 60-80$ each. Microsoft bought them, then started providing the all the games for a flat fee of 15$ per month.
I assumed their strategy was to lose money in the medium term while they worked on getting people used to playing games on subscription. Where they make their money back is when they stop outright selling games at full price and make them only available on subscription, and then they slowly start increasing that monthly subscription cost.
In order for that to work they need a large library and like 5-10 years.
I wonder if regulators will bring this up the next time Microsoft wants to buy another publisher. They fought tooth-and-nail to buy Activision Blizzard and like a child that got a new toy they’re throwing out the old ones.
It's secretly benefiting the smaller game studios because Microsoft is basically giving up marketshare. The real question is whether MS wants to buy any more studios.
Benefits how? I feel like gaming is going to become like the startup sector where companies create something to specifically get acquired by a big company.
Like it’s becoming so prevalent for these big gaming publishers to vacuum up IP and sit on it, it’s just the Disney-fication of gaming.
I agree. But these days having an IP prints money. Especially an IP as popular as minecraft, fallout, elder scrolls, call of duty, warcraft, Diablo and doom.
But you could argue halo players would go to play/try it due to brand recognition
I’m sure there are no bungie fans left but when it came out people would be curious
Also advertising wise my first reaction seeing it on the telly was “this looks like halo, this looks like halo” and so on for every scene in the advert
I think the “Microsoft dilemma” is between Making Some Money vs. Take All The Money.
If they publish a bunch of successful games on Steam or on Playstation, they will make Some Money, compared to games published exclusive to Xbox, where they can make All The Money.
By acquiring studios they are making sure that good franchises “don’t make all the money… yet” (on competing platform like Steam, Playstation or Switch, but also Android/iOS)
They could make good games exclusive for Xbox, but given how relatively unsuccessful is the Xbox platform, compared to Switch and Playstation, it would mean that very expensive (to make) games will bleed money
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