I was over on Wilhelm’s TAGN site today enjoying a good read about the disaster that is Xbox Games. I generally agree with everything he is saying: Microsoft has done a terrible job running their game business and it is showing. But I also have a somewhat different experience as a user of the Xbox console that I feel bears mentioning.
Note (mostly for Wilhelm’s benefit) that I did initially start to write this as a comment on his blog. But it started to get to be a bit too wordy, plus I’m currently constantly on the lookout for new posts for my blog for the Blaugust festival- so here we are.
A different perspective
I have a strange perspective coming at Xbox Games from the console side of things- strange because it seems like vanishingly few people are still using consoles for gameplay. Generally my experience with Xbox gaming is fairly good: I pay my monthly fee for Xbox Live and get a good selection of games I want to play either at no or low additional cost. Much of the time I get the base game for ‘free’ and pay for DLC and expansions, which also works out I imagine for Microsoft’s bottom line.
The store front on the console is adequate to my needs: I can search and it shows similar games based on my past interests, although it isn’t a sophisticated search like with Steam. It manages my purchases, downloads, game saves, and updates seamlessly. It all works well with the controller already in my hands from the gaming experience. I’m happy in the console Xbox ‘bubble’.
But on the PC side I can imagine the situation is much different. Without an exemplary UI and robust integration with Steam Microsoft is cut off from the environment where most PC gamers play. If they want to integrate well with Steam they would have to re-design the UI to make it capable of supporting the more complex categorization of games that Steam offers, and that probably wouldn’t be ‘backwards compatible’ with the Xbox.
And I am often left to wonder exactly how the Xbox Live experience works out for developers. Do they get a healthy stream of income? Or is the whole concept truly like Spotify for gaming, where the streamer/publisher (Microsoft in this case) sucks all the life out of the ecosystem?
It is a pretty opaque system: we don’t know how the Xbox Live revenue system really works. But the developers of moderately popular games should make enough revenue to pay their salaries and grow their business to keep creating better games. Extremely popular games should have more to grow and produce more ‘rich’ content faster. But if Microsoft truly expects every one of these subsidiary entities to experience remarkable growth then they need to reduce the share of the revenue they take off on the Xbox Live side of things. It seems like they are unwilling to do this. Wilhelm says pretty much this exact thing, and it really makes me wonder how smart business executives are that they didn’t work this out themselves years ago.
Future console
My gut tells me that Microsoft should be betting heavily on their next generation “PC like” console. If they can create a single UI with good Steam integration that is used on both PCs and the console platform it seems to me that they would have a competitive offering. This requires that Microsoft establish and maintain good relations with Valve and Gabe Newell: at least good enough to make sure their UI can play nicely with the Steam library. Supposedly they went part of the way towards this unified UI vision with the Xbox handheld (ROG Xbox Ally), but it remains to be seen if they can really make a go of it.
I would certainly give serious consideration to a new console that gave me access to my full Xbox library plus Steam in a single box. I expect such a device would be expensive given the current pressure AI has put on GPUs and memory. But a console with PC gaming features kept at or below equivalent gaming PC prices would get me to open my wallet fairly widely. My suspicion is that the market for this new console would be substantial: not industry-controlling, but competitive if well marketed.
Microsoft will not dominate the PC or console gaming markets regardless of what they do. But I feel that they can carve out a healthy niche if they are willing and able to maintain a sound business strategy for longer than it takes me to type this. That might be a big ask given their past history in the gaming marketplace.
The header image for this post was AI generated using ChatGPT