Xbox’s Gambit is Paying Off – Now What?

gamesreviews.com:

Xbox seems to have cracked its latest strategy to release games across multiple platforms. They were the biggest publisher in the world last month, and likely to stay that way until Grand Theft Auto VI comes out. This must be good news for Microsoft. It’s not enough for fans.

Since the multi-plat talk started more than a year ago, there has been a question about sustainability and the future of Xbox hardware. On the one hand, Xbox owns two massive publishers, both with huge historic releases and some huge hitter titles on the horizon. They have the perennially successful Call of Duty and Minecraft in their tool belt. Rereleasing classics like Halo and Gears of War where the people who want to play them already are will help them reach new levels of success. It’s hard to argue with any of these.

But it’s not enough for fans.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer explained how the company hoped to compete in hardware going forward, considering they don’t have any exclusives.

“I want people to pick hardware based on the capabilities of that hardware and how that fits into the choices that they want to make about where they want to play, and we want our hardware to win based on the hardware capabilities that we have,” he said. “I think the difference that we’ve seen in the last 20 years, and I think this is good because I come from building games, is it’s really games first, not platform first. Most of the games that you or I will talk about run across so many different platforms, and those are the games that are having success, those are the games at the top of the charts.”

What capabilities would be enough to sustain a platform that has no exclusives? What could Xbox offer that is so innovative that everybody flocks to that platform, but not so world shattering that the games can’t then be ported to Nintendo Switch 2?

There isn’t anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe Xbox will continue doing some really cool stuff going forward. Their work around backwards compatibility was