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- By Zoe Kleinman
- technology editor
Four Microsoft Xbox video games – and the company was frustratingly careful not to name them – will now open up to alternative platforms for the first time, boss Phil Spencer announced to the world last night.
He only gave a couple of clues: all four are community-driven, over a year old, and don’t include the recent releases of Starfield or Indiana Jones.
This seems like a big change of course for Microsoft, which has long favored the exclusivity of its own Xbox platform and Games Pass subscription service.
So what’s behind this change and what does it tell us about the future of video games?
Let’s start with a 12-year-old boy I know: my son.
He loves Minecraft and plays it whenever he can. On his phone, on his tablet, on our PlayStation, on his dad’s Xbox. Watch Minecraft videos on YouTube and use an unofficial app to create and share skins and mods.
He doesn’t care who owns the game (Microsoft bought the Mojang studio in 2014) and has no loyalty to the brand of a particular device: his favorite is whatever is at hand.
This is what gaming giants are up against: a generation of young gamers who don’t believe their hype.
It seems that Microsoft is beginning, very cautiously, to respond to this.
Last night Spencer insisted that the last four games did not signify a fundamental change in the company’s gaming strategy.
But then he added: “I have a fundamental belief that in the next five to ten years, exclusive games, which are exclusive to a single piece of hardware, will be a smaller and smaller part of the games industry.”
Image source, fake images
The hardware players use could become less important in the future
And it’s not just Xbox that’s excited about the idea: there have been similar rumors from Sony. In a recent earnings call, interim gaming president Hiroki Totoki said he wanted to put more PlayStation games on other platforms.
Like Microsoft, it didn’t name any particular games or specific platforms. It’s possible he meant that the company would continue with the status quo of putting PlayStation games on PC several months or even years after their release.
After years of fierce rivalry between the two companies and costly acquisitions of successful game studios that produce the most popular games, in an attempt to secure the best content for their own customers, this is definitely a change of heart (meanwhile, Nintendo he still has a tendency to keep his games to himself.)
The idea of turning basically any device with a screen into your company’s console is incredibly simple, if you think about it. Why go through the expensive and time-consuming process of building and selling proprietary hardware when so many people already carry a high-performance computer with them, in the form of phones?
Why restrict access to your best-selling titles when there is a large audience with alternative devices that also wants to buy them, play them, and pay for in-game extras?
Analysts Ampere estimated that a total of around 46.5 million consoles will be sold in 2023, of which only 7.6 million were Microsoft’s Xbox. That leaves nearly 39 million players who were not reached by Xbox exclusives, like Bethesda’s long-awaited Starfield.
It is beginning to be seen that this is an old-fashioned business model, with an old-fashioned motive: money.
“The key reason Microsoft has been pursuing a more progressive cross-platform strategy with its gaming content and services since the beginning of the Xbox One cycle is because it was unable to take advantage of the relative success of the Xbox 360 era and take market share away from Sony. and, later, Nintendo after the launch of Switch,” says Ampere analyst Piers Harding-Rolls.
Additionally, Microsoft has been busy gobbling up successful game studios for big bucks, at a time when creating games is already an expensive business.
In fact, during its controversial $68 billion acquisition of massive game maker Activision Blizzard, one of Sony’s main objections was that it could create blockbusters like Call of Duty, played by millions of people on PlayStations and Xbox exclusives. Microsoft was forced to promise that it would not do so for at least 10 years.
There has even been speculation that Microsoft could be preparing to exit the hardware market entirely, abandoning the Xbox console entirely, but Harding-Rolls doesn’t believe anything quite as dramatic is on the horizon.
“Ampere does not expect Microsoft to abandon the console platform business in the medium term, as that would leave a huge gap in its gaming-related revenues,” he added.
In fact, Xbox president Sarah Bond even teased the idea of some new hardware in a podcast released by Microsoft on Thursday.
“What we’re really focused on is delivering the biggest technical leap you’ve ever seen in a generation of hardware,” he said.
Unfortunately, your guess on this right now is as good as ours, although a rumor is spreading that it could be some kind of handheld device, designed to compete with the hugely successful Nintendo Switch.
In any case, Darren Edwards of gaming news website TheXboxHub sums it up neatly: “It’s not a doomsday scenario for Xbox.”
As for the games themselves, Microsoft’s preferred gateway is through Games Pass. For £12.99 a month, it offers unlimited access to hundreds of titles.
The company has been very quiet for a while about subscriber numbers, but tonight revealed that it had reached 34 million. It was launched in 2017 with the ambition of reaching 100 meters by 2030, a goal that still seems distant, with six years to go.
But it’s still good news for those making games that are on Games Pass, like UK-based publisher No More Robots.
“We want as many people on Game Pass as possible, because that naturally leads to more people playing our titles, which is especially useful for multiplayer titles that require a larger number of players to keep the community alive,” said the director Mike Rose.
Needless to say, there are also many relieved Xbox owners on social media right now. Many felt the announcement was an anticlimax after days of anticipation, and it certainly raised more questions than answers. But at least the message was more normal than a console bonfire.
One X player summed up the most popular opinion: “Xbox is not going away or becoming a third party. Can we all relax now?”
Additional reporting by Tom Gerken