A reader suggests that rather than being rivals, Xbox and PlayStation could be the perfect partners, if Sony and Microsoft can learn to trust each other.
We’re only a few weeks into 2023, but things have been interesting almost from the first day. We’ve already had a few notable game releases and while Nintendo hasn’t said anything about the Switch 2 we’ve had a PlayStation 5 preview trailer with a few small revelations and… a lot of stuff from Xbox.
I watched the Developer_Direct on Thursday and while I have some questions about Indiana Jones And The Great Circle (I’m not yet convinced first person was a good idea) and Avowed looked as generic as expected it was a good show. It was slick and well-paced and didn’t waste your time or insult your intelligence, which for a video game preview event is a bit of a rarity.
It was a convincing statement of intent from Xbox, but then we got the US sales info and oh boy. The Xbox Series X/S had its best December ever and it still came in third place? Behind the seven-year-old Switch and despite having a $150 price cut?! If they didn’t know before, this is conclusive proof for Microsoft: people don’t want to buy their console. And that’s before you start to look at the sales in Europe and Japan, which are even worse.
This creates a curious situation where Microsoft is doing everything it can to make Xbox a success and it’s getting nowhere and yet Sony is doing absolutely nothing and only getting more successful the longer it twiddles its thumbs. The business equivalent of, ‘Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.’
Despite spending tens of billions of dollars on buying companies, Xbox is still in no better position now than it was with the Xbox One. Not only are they not able to sell consoles but according to analysts Game Pass growth is going down not up.
Sure, they’re now the biggest games publisher around, and they’re never going to be short of cash, but beyond being Activision Blizzard with knobs on they’ve still not really seen any real success for two generations.
Sony has but while the PlayStation 4 worked for its living the PlayStation 5 has done virtually nothing to justify its popularity. Especially for the last two years, when not only has there been hardly any new releases but even less new announcements.
This is, of course, all very well know but the problem is there’s no sign of it stopping. And why would there be? You can just picture the Sony boardroom where some nervous junior exec suggests announcing some new games and they get shot down. ‘No!’ says Jim Ryan (or whoever’s pulling the strings now). ‘The less we do the more success we have so my master plan is to… do even less. No announcements! No new games! Nothing that anyone wants from us! It’s the proven secret to our success.’
That sounds like a bad parody but it’s literally true. That preview they had in the first week of the month, the only first party game it had was the already announced, and extremely un-anticipated, live service game Concord. All the actual revelations were about Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid Delta, which are nothing to do with Sony.
So rather than owing their success to first party games Sony is now reliant on other people’s games. They know how to sell consoles like they’re going out of fashion, which is something Xbox is terrible at, but they need content… other people’s content.
I can’t be the only one seeing this but at this point PlayStation and Xbox are the perfect partners. Microsoft has already said they don’t see Sony as a competitor, so why not embrace the odd situation they’re in. Microsoft makes much more money selling Call Of Duty on PlayStation 5 than Xbox, so why not apply that logic to everything?
Whether they continue to make consoles or not is irrelevant because hardly anyone’s buying them anyway, so there’s no competition there. The problem is that Sony, rightly, won’t trust Microsoft to not use their new status as a third party publisher as a temporary measure, before trying to get back into consoles or trying to make streaming a thing (which I can’t see working until Wi-Fi sees a quantum leap in reliability).
If Microsoft is willing to accept that their console sales are never going to beat Sony, and if they lean into their role as the biggest third party publisher in the West, then PlayStation is the perfect partner for them. If both companies can avoid stabbing each other in the back, then we could be looking at a new golden age for gaming.
By reader Ashton Marley