Xbox has only two options for the future and Microsoft won’t like either of them – Reader’s Feature

With Xbox console sales at a new low, a reader suggests that Microsoft needs a major change of plan, and it doesn’t involve releasing a new console.

It seems this whole generation we’ve been watching the collapse of Xbox in slow motion. It was obvious the Xbox Series X/S was a flop from the first moment and I think most people were surprised by that and just how badly it did. I know I was but then it started to make sense when you realised that people are already locked into the PlayStation ecosystem and they’re not going to give that up for the sequel to the Xbox One, that has no decent launch games.

I was still shocked at how quickly things fell apart though, especially the failure of Game Pass and how buying Activision Blizzard, or really any of the companies they bought, didn’t even move the needle for them. I don’t think it was their fault but to spend all that money only to have Call Of Duty have its worst year ever is a terrible bit of luck.

Not that I’m going to shed a tear for a giant corporation but as much as other people have a go at him, I do feel Phil Spencer had his heart in the right place. Whether he was a good person to be in charge I’m not sure, but I think circumstances were definitely against him. Whether it was bad luck or bad management doesn’t really matter though because I think it’s time to admit that the Xbox experiment has failed.

The new boss keeps talking about bringing Xbox back to what it was and even hinting at exclusivity but either she’s a crazy person or she’s just having people on. There’s no way they can bring back exclusives. Who’d buy them? There aren’t enough people with only an Xbox to cover the cost of making a game and there’s no way they’d make money just on PC. There’s a reason big budget PC exclusives died out in the 90s.

As far as I see, there are only two options for Microsoft right now and none of them involve releasing a console (if the new console is basically a PC then fine, but that means it’s going to be so expensive it’ll never be more than a niche). There’s just no point. They lost the rest of the world over a generation ago and I don’t think even anyone in the US cares all that much about being an Xbox fan now.

So option number one is to just admit that you’re a third party developer like EA or Take-Two and just make games and release them on every format possible. This is the most obvious thing to do I don’t understand why they haven’t done it already. I mean they kind of have, because nobody’s buying the Xbox right now, but going on about Project Helix and the new boss, they act like there’s a way back to the good old days of the Xbox 360.

There’s not though, I dare anyone to describe any scenario where Xbox comes in at anything more than a distant third this or next generation. Maybe they can be relevant again if video game streaming takes off but even then I wouldn’t bet on it. The name Xbox won’t attract anyone, only the quality of the streaming and at the moment, as far as I hear, it’s not very good.

Option two is a lot of bother but I suspect it’s actually more likely they’ll go for this, and that’s to sell off their games business. The big problem is that considering how badly Call Of Duty is doing at the moment, there’s no way that line is going to go up any time soon. It makes a lot of revenue, sure, but that number is going down.

All a company like Microsoft cares about is making more profit than the last year and that is not going to happen with Call Of Duty, Activision in general, or Xbox as a whole.

My preference would be to have Activision Blizzard go independent again abut I don’t know of any way that can happen, given the money involved. They can’t afford a management buyout given what Microsoft paid for them, so unless there’s some legal thing I’m not aware of they’ll have to sell them to Amazon or Apple or someone.

It’s not ideal but at least one company wouldn’t own half the Western game publishers anymore and Activision would have their undivided attention. It’s not perfect but the mess Xbox has put the whole games industry in is just terrible and I’d much rather Activision and Bethesda survived it than Xbox.

Microsoft has been in the games industry for 25 years this year and barely five years of that was anything but a complete disaster. At some point you’ve just got to accept things haven’t worked out and call it quits.

By reader Xane

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