Will Xbox publishing on rival consoles spark a Revolution? | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Do you remember the codename for the Wii?

It was called project 'Revolution', which was a surprising moment of hubris for a company that had been soundly defeated (again) by PlayStation. Not only had Sony trounced sales of Nintendo's console for a second consecutive generation, but it had also extended its lead and Nintendo had fallen further behind. The house of Mario had been defeated.

Nintendo needed to pivot to something else. Sega, following the Dreamcast, had pivoted to third-party publishing. Yet Nintendo had other ideas. It looked at its competitors, specifically what they weren't doing and who they weren't catering for, and went after that audience instead.

The Revolution/Wii was a huge success alongside its Nintendo DS sister product. When iPhone came along and started to cater for this newly found casual audience (more effectively and on a greater scale), Nintendo pivoted again, bringing its IP to mobile and building a device that sat somewhere between smartphones and high-end consoles (the Switch).

Some fans still bemoan Nintendo's reluctance to invest in higher specs with its hardware, but it lost that battle, and since it gave up going head-to-head with Xbox and PlayStation, it's managed to release three systems that have each sold more than 100 million units (and notably, three systems that outsold the PlayStation equivalent at the time). It was through failure that Nintendo reached greater heights.

Just like Nintendo couldn't in 2005, Xbox cannot beat PlayStation. We operate in a business where people are locked into their ecosystems. PlayStation is where their trophies are, where their high scores can be found, it's what their friends are playing on, it's where their digital game library sits… the amount of time, effort and money required to convince people to abandon one platform for another in 2024 is simply too high. Xbox has also been defeated.

So what does Microsoft's 'Revolution' look like? Whereas Nintendo took a hardware approach to finding new