After the release of Redfall met with dismal reviews, the gaming community has now started to question Xbox on the relatively poor showing of its first-party developers (or in this case, first-party adjacent developers as Redfall’s publisher Bethesda isn’t technically part of Xbox Game Studios).
Xbox head Phil Spencer addressed the issue head-on in the latest episode of the Kinda Funny Xcast, where he affirmed that Xbox is “not in the business of out-consoling Sony or out-consoling Nintendo”, to the point that he even says that just making good games isn’t enough to get more people to buy an Xbox.
“There is no world where Starfield is an 11 out of 10 and people are selling their PS5s. That’s not going to happen,” he said.
Taking that quote out of context, it is wild to see the head of Xbox, who approved the acquisition of Bethesda worth billions of dollars, only say this about the biggest Bethesda game coming out this September that’s also an Xbox console exclusive.
But the context is that Spencer is being real that when Xbox lost its player share during the Xbox One generation, the eight-generation of gaming consoles, it was the worse one to lose.
“I see it out there, I see commentary that if you just build great games, everything would turn around,” he said. “It’s just not true that if we go off and build great games, all of a sudden you’re going to see console share shift in some dramatic way.
“We lost the worst generation to lose in the Xbox One generation, where everybody built their digital library of games.”
That bit at the end, the digital library, is what makes Spencer essentially waving the white flag in the so-called console wars. Players already have purchased digital games tied to a specific ecosystem, and unlike past generations where all games are sold physically- and thus, easier for anyone to switch console brands each gen- with the PS4 and Xbox One, that seems unlikelier more than ever.
We even saw this play out when Epic Games decide to compete head-on with Valve’s Steam. Steam has been the de-facto PC games launcher and storefront that Epic-exclusive games were met with negative reactions in the early years. And Epic is also smart to give out free games weekly on that platform- to get players to build their “digital library of games”.
Xbox has previously said their main competitors are not Sony (PlayStation) or Nintendo, but the likes of Amazon and Google as they are focusing more on cloud gaming rather than the console wars. So this is just another iteration of that same point.
The introduction of Game Pass also shows that Microsoft wants Xbox to be a service brand more than a console maker. With PC Game Pass, Xbox has been able to reach more countries around the world, including around these parts of Southeast Asia, without even selling an Xbox officially.
Still, hopefully, that quote doesn’t mean that Xbox has entirely given in producing critically acclaimed games. Even if it doesn’t make new Xbox sales, surely it should make Game Pass subscribers keep subscribing.