this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Xbox’s ‘Exclusive’ Video Game Strategy Leaves Everyone Confused (www.bloomberg.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

They've been making Windows look more and more like a console OS for years, so I've been expecting something like this