Starfield did not prove to be a killer app (Picture: Bethesda)
A reader refutes Xbox’s suggestion that exclusives have caused stagnation in the console market and argues they should make more not less.
I’d say what a week it’s been but it’s only Wednesday as I type this, so there’s still two days left for Xbox boss Phil Spencer to say something else ridiculous, as an excuse for why nothing he does ever works. I don’t know that everything at Xbox is his fault but he’s the frontman and certain things, like Game Pass and buying Activision Blizzard, were definitely his idea, so there’s only so much leeway I’m willing to give an incompetent multi-millionaire that’s destroying my hobby.
I am, of course, referring to the various post-mortems from last week’s GDC (Game Developers Conference) which is an event that wasn’t on my radar but is apparently a big meeting place for developers to give speeches and make business deals. And apparently the two big topics were how the PS5 Pro is a pointless waste of time and Xbox is a flaming dumpster fire.
I think we’re well beyond mincing words at this point, about how Sony and Microsoft have sleepwalked into disaster where they can no longer afford to make big budget games, and where their only answer is to not only throw the baby out with the bathwater but to nuke the bath, and everything else within a 10 mile radius, from orbit.
Although I think Xbox has been particularly stupid, I don’t want to pretend that Sony has been anything other than dumb itself, with their alternative to just lowering budgets being to give up making proper games entirely and focus on nothing but live service games. We even found out this week that Bend Studio are working on one too, which implies everyone is.
Of course Sony won’t tell us that, they haven’t said a thing since this whole crisis began to break, but this week Microsoft broke the silence with an ‘interview’ with Polygon. I put interview in quotes because nobody seems to have actually interrogated him, just let him ramble on and not correct him when he talks obvious nonsense.
The problem is he keeps painting what are very clearly Xbox problems as industry problems, and nobody challenges him on this. He keeps complaining about a lack of growth and is now, bizarrely, blaming exclusives for this ‘stagnation’. This despite the fact that the Switch is Nintendo’s most successful home console ever and the PlayStation 4 owes a huge amount of its success to its exclusive games.
Nobody has bought an Xbox for its exclusives since the Xbox 360 days and that is squarely on Phil Spencer, because he’s been in charge for over 10 years now and he hasn’t overseen a single must-have game for Xbox in all that time. The closest he’s got is Forza but nobody’s buying an Xbox just for that. What I wonder though is whether Spencer is just using all this as an excuse or if he genuinely doesn’t understand the importance of exclusives, because he’s never had a decent one.
I think he understands, because he wanted to make all the Bethesda games exclusive. Although he’s pretty obviously signalling that all that’s going to change soon. Which means he’s going to have straight up lied in terms of everything he said when the first batch of multiformat games were announced.
He’s also started to go on about Gen Z and how they don’t understand the concept of exclusives, because everything else is available on both iPhone and Android (which clearly isn’t true, but that hardly seems worth arguing about at this point).
He says this as if Gen Z are all tweens who have never seen the outside of a touchscreen, except Gen Z can be anyone from 12 all the way up to 27, so clearly the concept of exclusive content is not like trying to explain a fax machine to them. Especially if they’ve ever subscribed to a television service.
Gen Z will buy a console for a good exclusive just as much as anyone else but what are they expected to be excited about on Xbox? Halo Infinite and Starfield? All of Xbox’s problems come down to one thing: they’ve not got any groundbreaking exclusives and they haven’t had any for over a decade now. If they were the ones that had published The Last Of Us or Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom we’d be hearing a very different line from Spencer right now.
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But now Xbox is setting up the narrative, as it has for a while now, that not only are exclusives bad but they’re responsible for the stagnation that only Xbox is experiencing. (PlayStation 5 has its own problems but because of the amount of money it costs to make modern games, what with Sony not being anywhere near as rich as Microsoft).
Sony and Microsoft need to make more exclusives, not less. The minute Sony’s release schedules dried up is when they started to get in trouble, which is not a coincidence. The situation is the very opposite of what Microsoft is pretending. It’s all madness and I really don’t know where it is going to end but somehow I don’t think it’s going to be good news for gamers.
By reader Purple Ranger
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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