| Hi everyone. Today we’re trying to figure out just what the heck Xbox is doing, but first... This week’s top gaming news: Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox and Sony Group Corp.’s PlayStation have long been the Pepsi and Coke of video games — bitter rivals, each with their own factions of loyal fans. (Nintendo Co., once a third contender, is now in its own world — less Dr. Pepper and more, say, Starbucks.) Both video game giants built stables of internal game developers to develop franchises solely for their own consoles. These exclusives were the main reason to pick one over the other. To play Halo and Gears of War, you needed to buy an Xbox. For Uncharted and The Last of Us, you had to have a PlayStation. But a series of poor business decisions in 2013 gave the PlayStation 4 a huge lead over the Xbox One, and Microsoft’s gaming group has been playing catch-up ever since. Microsoft no longer reports hardware sales, but analysts estimate that the latest PlayStation is now outselling the Xbox upwards of 5 to 1. To make up for this hardware deficit, Xbox has doubled down on Game Pass, a subscription service that allows players to access an ever-growing catalog of games for a low monthly fee. Under Microsoft Gaming Chief Executive Officer Phil Spencer, the label also went on a spending spree, buying game studios and publishers such as Bethesda Softworks ($7.5 billion) and Activision Blizzard ($69 billion). But since closing the Activision deal last fall, Xbox has made a series of moves that have left fans and analysts baffled about its overall strategy. It has laid off thousands of staff, shuttered studios and been unable to articulate a consistent message about how it plans to release games. Xbox fans assumed those big acquisitions would lead to more exclusive games that helped justify their console purchase, but the opposite has happened. Early this year, Microsoft began putting some of its former exclusives on PlayStation, starting with smaller, older titles such as Hi-Fi Rush. This week, the company announced that another big, new title will follow the same route. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, coming in December to Xbox and PC, will arrive on PlayStation in the spring of 2025. Ditching console exclusives is good news for players who can only afford to stick to one piece of hardware. And Microsoft was able to squeeze the Activision deal past regulatory scrutiny in part because it promised to continue releasing Call of Duty on PlayStation. But Xbox’s release strategy has been so confusing, it requires a massive spreadsheet and a full-time job to keep track of it all. Even within a single label, the company’s choices are inconsistent. Take Bethesda, which Microsoft acquired in 2020. Three games from the publisher have inexplicably different rollout plans. Last year’s Starfield was released only on Xbox and PC, with no PlayStation version in sight. Indiana Jones will be a “timed exclusive,” coming to PlayStation a few months after its initial release. But the upcoming DOOM: The Dark Ages, scheduled for 2025, will release simultaneously on Xbox, PC and Playstation. Obsidian, the well-regarded game maker that was purchased by Microsoft in 2019, recently put out PlayStation versions of two games, Pentiment and Grounded. Yet its next game, Avowed, is scheduled to come out in February 2025 on just PC and Xbox, with no announced PlayStation release. These rollouts make little sense. Perhaps the company is still trying to straddle the line between reaching as many players as possible and burning fans who bought Xbox hardware under the belief that they would not be able to get those games elsewhere. But this sporadic, case-by-case strategy benefits nobody and baffles everyone. It’s not hard to discern why Xbox is chasing PlayStation players. Former Xbox exclusives Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves have seen big audiences on the rival platform. And this year has been all about cutting costs and generating more profit for Xbox, which has faced increased scrutiny from Microsoft since the Activision purchase, Bloomberg has reported. Spencer admitted as much this week when asked about the decision to put Indiana Jones on PlayStation. “We run a business,” he said. “It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the company, because we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing in what we’re available to go do.” Or, reading between the lines: Microsoft let us spend $69 billion to buy Activision, and now we’d better deliver. But all of Spencer’s changes have made the Xbox hardware less valuable to potential audiences. The best move — the winning move — would be for Spencer and his team to eschew exclusives and rethink its console strategy entirely. In 2017, I wrote on Twitter that Xbox had clearly lost the hardware war to PlayStation and should consider transforming its consoles into living room PCs with open operating systems that could run any computer game. As the company behind the Windows operating system, Microsoft is in a unique position to sell machines that combine the convenience and affordability of consoles with the flexibility of PCs. At the time, Spencer called the notion “strange.” But what’s really strange is not knowing where or when your games are going to be released. Check out Tactical Breach Wizards, a new strategy game about spellcasters in heavy combat gear who have to go on XCOM-style missions, sniping enemies and pushing them out windows along the way. | 
