Platform games
What does Xbox’s multiformat future mean for consoles?
What does ‘Xbox’ actually mean, in 2024? The name suggests a physical object, of course, but recent events suggest Microsoft is paying about as much attention to the increasingly dusty black cuboid under our TV as we have been of late. Not that it seems to have an alternative definition prepared – its business-update broadcast in February had the feel of a meeting called to try to answer this very question, Phil Spencer and co offering a variety of possible options. The most striking one, ultimately? “One of the largest publishers on PlayStation [and] on Nintendo Switch.”
It’s a counter-intuitive way of describing a current platform holder, even if the underpinning facts are well known. Many of the studios and publishers
Microsoft has rolled up over the years were midway through projects, and thus presumably committed to other platforms: Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2, InXile’s Wasteland 3, Bethesda’s Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo, not to mention its ongoing support for ESO and Fallout 76. More to the point, it owns Minecraft and now Call Of Duty, two of the biggest series in videogames. Indeed, we have to wonder if the developments that triggered February’s broadcast are a knock-on result of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition, and the assurances regarding COD’s future on other platforms that had to be made to get the deal through regulators. (Indeed, an interview with the Sea Of Thieves team suggests that these plans were first put in place at the beginning of 2023, in the midst of Microsoft’s antitrust hearings in the US, UK and EU.)
In that light, the announcement itself emerged as something of an anticlimax, certainly by comparison to the rumours that had circled in advance, and the rending of garments (and hardware) that followed, at the idea of Xbox giving away the crown jewels. None of those big-ticket series reared their heads, in the event, and the reports of Starfield and Indiana Jones And The Great Circle making the leap came to nothing – for now, anyway. Instead, the lineup consisted of Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded and Sea Of Thieves, a grab bag of titles with no obvious connection except that they have, per Spencer
himself, “reached their full potential”, their headlining days well behind them.
It’s a little easier to see this as a show of faith with the two service games of the lineup. Sea Of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate presents it as “an opportunity, six years in, to go to all these new players”, continuing what creative director Mike Chapman tells us has been continued growth of its playerbase “every single year”. Chapman argues that it’s a logical fit for the “shared-world” game, which expanded to Steam back in 2020. Only time will tell, though, whether Sea Of Thieves manages any kind of sizeable expansion on PS5, and Neate tells us it’s “not something we have hard targets on”. But by Microsoft’s standards, surely we’re looking at a matter of pocket change – raising the question of why the company is doing this at all.
The only logical explanation seems to be that these games are guinea pigs – or, perhaps, coalmine-bound canaries – for a future development more akin to the one that got the Internet afroth in the first place. That’s a conclusion that Spencer was keen to dissuade, saying in the update: “Please don’t take it as some signal that everything’s coming.” Still, there was a lot of talk about learning from the experience, so presumably there are other games in the queue. Perhaps it’s just a case of learning the ropes in preparation for the launch of the next Call Of Duty, although you might hope that Activision has people for that. (Perhaps they were among the 1,900 staff laid off in January, as Xbox consolidated off the back of the merger.)
Whatever conclusion we attempt to draw, it’s contradicted or caveated by some other line from the broadcast or the handful of interviews Spencer has been prepared to indulge. Microsoft isn’t obliged to make its entire business plan public, of course (at least, not since the regulator hearings have ended), but surely the point of making such an announcement is to mark out the platform holder’s vision for the future.
Perhaps this is simplistic thinking. It could be that Microsoft came off as a jack of all trades, committed to none, precisely because that is the vision. Its console business has been trailing behind competitors Sony and Nintendo for so
long now that perhaps it really is a case of trying out as many things as possible to see what sticks. In one interview, Spencer seemed to suggest as much: “I tell you honestly, running the business, having a diversity of business models that are working is pretty critical.”
If three or four years ago we might have boiled down the entire Xbox strategy to those two magic words, Game Pass, then Spencer put a pin in that, saying: “Maybe ten to 15 per cent of our content and service revenue is subscriber revenue.” Which didn’t stop the company from assuring viewers of the business update that all its games, including Diablo IV, will be available to Game Pass subscribers (of whom there are now 34 million, not counting any free trials). “We’re at the highest level of users on console, the highest level of users on PC, the highest level of users on cloud ever,” Xbox president Sarah Bond said during the broadcast. “We have doubledigit growth rate on PC and cloud, places where we’re enabling creators to actually reach new players beyond the console ecosystem.”
How quickly ‘console’ exits the conversation between sentences suggests that it’s failing to grow at anything like the rate of PC or cloud streaming. Indeed, if there is any message to be taken from Microsoft’s muddle of announcements, it seems to be that there’s not much headroom left in consoles, and the platform holder needs to move on.
Across the executive team there were repeated references to letting go of outdated thinking. Spencer told The Verge: “I know there’s this fictitious world where people think that one exclusive game kind of kicks off the sales of a platform, but the industry just doesn’t really work that way today.” Not for Microsoft, perhaps, but Animal Crossing and Breath Of The Wild might have helped shift a few Switches.
On the broadcast, Bond and head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty seemed to be singing from the same hymn sheet. “When you just step back and you look at the history of the industry, we’ve moved from a place where it used to be that someone built and launched a game to accelerate hardware, to actually the things we do with our hardware and with our platform are all in service of making those games bigger,” Bond said. And Booty: “We’ve kind of seen this inversion over the past five years where it used to be that the platform was the biggest thing, and the games would tuck in within the platform. Today, big games like Roblox or Fortnite can be bigger than any one platform.” All variations, ultimately, on the same chorus: ‘The old ways are dead’.
More surprisingly, though, over on the other side of the street we found
Sony picking up the tune. As part of a quarterly earnings call, Hiroki Totoki, interim replacement for outbound PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, told investors: “In the past, as you all know, we wanted to popularise console, and the firstparty titles’ main purpose was to make the console popular.” A line, it’s worth noting, that was wholly absent from the post-call transcript, something Sony put down to the vagaries of live translation.
Totoki was similarly keen to deemphasise the console business in its traditional form, talking up the importance of “multiplatform” releases. Not that Sony is planning to follow Xbox’s lead, he clarified – this refers to PC releases, which have become increasingly common for its in-house blockbusters. The SIEpublished Helldivers 2 has been a huge success owing to launching simultaneously on PS5 and Steam, while Sony has confirmed that it is working on PC support for its PSVR2 headset, an unprecedented move a year on from its launch. (It’s a relief, at least, that something is being done with that hardware, which looks to have been abandoned by Sony, the closure of London Studio and layoffs at Call Of The Mountain dev Firesprite possibly the final nails in the coffin of firstparty support.)
Totoki’s comments came alongside the announcement that PS5 was four million units short of its annual sales targets – despite selling, according to Ampere Analysis estimates, three times as many units as Xbox Series in 2023. And he cautioned that sales are only going to diminish with time: “Looking ahead, PS5 will enter the latter stage of its lifecycle.” This matches expectations: PS5 and Xbox Series both launched three and a half years ago, their predecessors having arrived seven years before that. That’s an awfully long time in tech – long enough to get itchy for Switch’s successor, which reports suggest won’t arrive until the original console’s eighth birthday.
Yet it certainly doesn’t feel as though we’re halfway through a generation. Xbox, by our count, has managed just
If there is any message to be taken, it seems to be that there’s not much headroom left in consoles
16 firstparty games since the launch of its Series consoles; Sony has fared a little better, with 22. By comparison, Nintendo has published 82 games on Switch. (That figure is bolstered heavily by rereleases of one kind or another, of course, but the same can be said of Xbox and especially PlayStation.) This speaks to the greater range of scope in Nintendo’s portfolio, compared to the long development cycles that are now the default for its competitors. Microsoft has a dozen more releases slated, assuming the likes of Everwild and Perfect Dark ever resurface. But Sony’s next confirmed release is 2025’s Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, and Totoki confirmed that “we do not plan to release any new major existing franchise titles next fiscal year”.
Casting an eye to the three and a half years left in the tank, it’s difficult not to wonder if this might be remembered as something of a lost generation in which Microsoft and Sony transitioned to whatever comes next. Looking at the continuing layoffs across the industry, it’s undeniable that something isn’t working. And, from the perspective of Sony and Microsoft, it’s easy to see why they might want to move beyond the model of hardware sold at a loss, its break-even reliant on the sales of games that are increasingly difficult and costly to make.
Besides, as Spencer told The Verge: “The software part of the business is an easier part of the business to grow and scale.” Thanks to how the stock market functions, public companies need to be able to show constant growth to shareholders and potential investors – something that Spencer seemed to suggest might simply not be possible with the audience it is currently addressing. “We found 200 million global households that will play console games,” he said in an interview with Game File. “And that number really hasn’t changed in the last five, six years.”
Maybe the industry is scraping its natural ceiling, then. Not in terms of hitting the maximum number of people who would enjoy playing videogames, which is surely more or less equal to the number of people on Earth. But rather those who are interested in playing them in this specific manner: via a dedicated box that sits below your TV, its fans occasionally spinning up to disturb the dust that has gathered with time.