this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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I wonder what took them so long to make a response. The community was turning against them and they took an entire week to tell them that no, they do, in fact, want to keep making video game consoles.
Nothing announced in the video is ground-breaking, nor did it require so much time to prepare.
(Honestly, Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush going multiplatform in place of Starfield is a huge win for PlayStation users lol)
The community was freaking the fuck out and it was seriously the weirdest thing I've ever seen.
People defending exclusives and berating MS for taking their games multiplatform, IGN claiming that Xbox was on fire and dying as a brand, people pissed that somehow Xbox was abandoning loyal fans...
The whole thing was so overblown.
The point is, Xbox is performing very badly, with the latest metrics suggesting not only that PS5 blew them out of the water, but also that XSeries is selling less than its predecessor. Coupled with rumors about exclusives going multiplatform, people feared that it meant that MS didn't have enough faith in the brand to keep going, and that Xbox would end like Windows Phone.
The concern was real and, in my opinion, perfectly justified. MS telling them to wait a week for an answer, without dismissing the rumors was the weird part. They saw the community on fire and said, "This is fine". All-around incompetence.
Except if anyone paid any attention to Microsoft over the last 5 years they'd already know that Microsoft don't want exclusives because they want to bring PC and Xbox together.
People need to stop being baited by shitty journalists. Grow a braincell or 2.
Edit: The braincell part not directed to the commenter above me.
Those games are already available on PC, nobody was freaking out about that. People were wary of MS exclusives being ported to other console platforms.
Consoles live and die by exclusives. Porting those over suggests a lack of faith in the brand and would be like admitting defeat. It wasn't clickbait rage journos baiting people, it was people reading the room and realising that the Xbox brand wasn't as strong as they thought.
I mean I guess? Exclusives are anti-consumer so I don't know why people defend them. Sounds cultish to me
You don't need to defend exclusives or become part of a cult to understand how the market works.
Exclusives are a big part of what makes a console successful (not the only one, mind you, but they certainly play a role in convincing people to buy a console), and porting them over to the competing console would be like admitting defeat for MS.
Although fanboys certainly exist (on both sides), a lot of people weren't being cultish. They were simply concerned for the future of Xbox and re-evaluating their choice: why buy a console, when I can buy the competition and play all its games plus other exclusive titles? Why invest in a digital library if there's no guarantee that the platform will keep existing?
Well you've said it yourself, Microsoft are trying to remove that physical limitation to accessing a platform. But Microsoft knows what the market wants, people have been against exclusives for a long time and they want to remove that, I shouldn't have to spend £300 to play a game when I have equipment already capable of playing a game Infront of me.
So being scared that Xbox is going to disappear is stupid, the consoles might, but Microsoft has been transforming Xbox into a platform for years, starting with the release of windows 7 when they introduced XboxLive for windows alongside halo 2. This has been a long term goal.
If Xbox disappears, so does your digital library and other purchases (some games you can buy once and get on PC as well, but last time I checked, they were few and far in between). I can see that being a concern for people that bought into the Xbox ecosystem for the last few gens.
Isn't console speculation always kind of overblown?