Amidst Playstation & Nintendo breaking in record sales, how is XBOX falling so far behind their more competent & popular competition?

About a month or two ago, I was taken back by something that XBOX CEO Phil Spencer told reporters in regards to how XBOX was performing compared to other gaming brands like Nintendo & Playstation. “As the console wars is a social construct with the community, I would never want to count our community out, they’re big fans, If you look at our market share in the console space over the last 20 plus years, we’re in third place. We are behind Sony and Nintendo in console share globally.”

XBOX has been centre focus in the public eye for the past couple weeks, but not because of any new console release or the announcement of a new game. Rather, their attempt to purchase gaming giant Activision/Blizzard has been barred from the Federal Trade Commission at risk of giving Microsoft a monopoly in the games market, including privately distributing the extremely popular & profitable Call of Duty franchise to XBOX platforms. This led to me thinking about XBOX as an overall brand, especially with the annual E3 games conference wrapping up, & my overall consensus on the brand is “What good reason do I have to get an XBOX?”

The Game Selection Kinda Sucks

Before I continue, let me clarify something. XBOX has a list of great exclusive games. From the early Halo Games, Gears of War, Fable, etc, XBOX has a list of capable developers, yet their presence in the modern eye is almost non-existent. Do people even remember that a new Halo Game even released a few years back for the new XBOX Series? Well other than the fact that it was supposed to launch with the XBOX Series X & S before getting delayed, XBOX has done an awful job at supporting the game, leading to a massive drop in players & the game’s supposed “10- year plan” being dropped as 343 Industries is working on the next instalment. Even looking at another of the franchises I listed earlier in Fable, they announced a new Fable game, but it’s not coming out until at least next year, and the last time a Fable game even came out was in 2010. Even original releases from XBOX have been lacklustre to even attrocious. Last May, XBOX owned Arkane Studios launched Redfall, a bug ridden, lazily compiled cooperative shooter that sold horribly & fell off harder than Halo Infinite. If you play your games solely on XBOX, the only major exclusive that you have left this year is Bethesda’s Starfield.

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

Comparing XBOX to its main competitor in Playstation, what’s stopping a competitor from buying an XBOX over a Playstation? Well while Playstation players get access to the same third party support that’s available on XBOX, Playstation owners get access to franchises like God of War, The Last of Us, Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet & Clank, Spiderman, the list goes on. Just having games like Halo isn’t enough to make your console stand out if better experiences are waiting on Playstation. But here’s the funniest part to me, as a ploy to get more people to switch to XBOX, Microsoft made the XBOX Series X & S more affordable to consumers compared to Sony’s big white boxes. Here in Canada, a normal PS5 will retail for about $650 before tax while the XBOX apparent is only $600 but has similar, if not the same specifications as a PS5, so what’s the problem? Well the exclusives end up being the dealbreaker for a lot of people when choosing a console. I work as a sales advisor for an electronics store & the main question that I get asked all the time is “can I play (insert game here) on this?” Now exclusives aren’t all that a console has to offer, since most players are playing experiences that can be found anywhere from console to computer, but my main point is that these experiences are what sell consoles. Not only are people paying more money to own a console that can play franchises like Spiderman, but this ends up growing into a herd mentality, when people will also buy the same console that a friend/family member has so they can play together, & the more popular console ends up standing on top.

The Accessibility is “Too Good”

To give credit, XBOX has been working to make their game library more accessible & more “modern”. Launching XBOX Game Pass in 2017, XBOX allowed players with a select library of games to play & try out, allowing only a monthly fee that gave them unlimited playtime. Think Netflix but for games. For the consumer, this is a great deal. Not only is XBOX offering them a selection of older classics on top of their new releases, but with select plans, they can play these games with free online, & from a PC computer as well. But here’s the problem. Is XBOX Game Pass profitable in the long term? What do I mean by this? Well say I used the previously mentioned Starfield as an example. The game’s slated for an early September release date, & is expected to go to XBOX Game Pass on launch day. Now if I’m the consumer that wants to try out this brand new game, what would I rather do? Fork over over $90 to XBOX & own the game or pay around $20 monthly to try the game out for a month & play something else if I get bored? Unless I’m dedicated to playing the game long term, a good bunch of people are going to subscribe, try it, then unsubscribe later when they get bored or finish with it. In my mind, this just negates the reason of owning an XBOX because your not paying to own & play games, your paying monthly for experiences that you can try but not own, on top of the $600+ you’ve payed to try out an experience that might not even be worth it. But this isn’t even looking at the bigger problem here. Since nobody wants to fork over $600+ to try, not own, try games, Microsoft is offering its XBOX Game Pass service to Windows PC’s to offer more diversity in how PC Players can play games. Again, this is great for the players, but it hampers XBOX in the long run since any revenue from new releases is going to get lost within people subscribing to XBOX Game Pass & paying Microsoft less money. You can’t win a “console war” if you ditch your console just to make games for a service that requires another product that may not even be used for gaming. It’s funny since Playstation has something similar to this, but they don’t put anticipated releases on the service until like a year or so later, and if they do, it’s a limited trial that allows you to buy the actual game at a discounted rate if needed.

In Short, XBOX is a failed brand in my mind, just another flag that Microsoft owns & can push to Windows 11 subscribers (and just me saying that is going to get me some fun messages on XBOX LIVE). It could go the way of Sega & just stick to producing games for other platforms, but I doubt it. Unless they keep releasing lacklustre experiences & cancelling much hyped projects, XBOX can still be able to stand well against the Japanese giants but XBOX doesn’t have a history of doing that, right?

…right?