Console WarGames - why the only winning move for Microsoft is not to play
The year is 2005. Its been a rough one; the Pope has died, Live8 happened, and George Bush has won a second term as US President. However, amongst the gathered darkness there was a ray of hope; the Xbox 360 was released. The successor to the impactful but not successful original Xbox, the ‘360’ as it would be affectionately known, would go on to dominate that generation of console gaming. In part because it was cheap, readily available and boasted a reliable online gaming platform which Sony’s contender just couldn’t replicate. The Console Forever War had a new champion, and had done so in such a comprehensive manner that it was hard to see Sony rallying. Yet rally they most certainly did, and the PlayStation 4 was a phenomenon while the Xbox One (the 360’s confusingly named follow-up) was totally wiped out. I am here to tell you that Microsoft must never forgot the lesson this taught them.
Sony reigned supreme, but as the years passed we inevitably turned our collective attention to the next would-be competitor. However this generation had been unique, we just hadn’t realised it. In the midst of the usual carnage of game releases, exclusives, hits and flops; the age of the digital storefront had begun and with it, the beginning of the end for consoles.
Digital storefronts were not unique to video games, iTunes had popularised the idea years before. The sheer size of video games files meant that physical media still held sway. as internet infrastructure was developed and deployed to facilitate speedier downloads of larger file sizes. So while discs were still the order of the day, the idea of downloading games direct to your console had taken root, was becoming more and more popular by the year. We should have realised then that building the hardware no longer provided the comparative advantage it once had. It’s a simple enough idea, but let me break it down; in years gone by, video game software was developed in tandem with the hardware engineering teams. This was because, as a developer, you needed to know what the hardware could do and how it would work and the only people who truly understood that were the ones building it. These days, standardised development frameworks and game engines mean that game software development is increasingly divorced from the manufacturing of hardware.
So you have a situation where games are being developed independently of the hardware engineers, the games are designed to standard frameworks and as such are hardware agnostic by definition, and physical media is all but extinct. In this world, being a manufacturer of hardware is an expensive luxury. For Xbox, which has done nothing but lose ground since the ‘360’ era, an important decision is about to be made. In the immortal words of a very different Joshua (who was voiced by a ‘John Wood’, in a spooky coincidence) “the only winning move is not to play”. Microsoft must make the impossible decision to walk away from the hardware fight completely, and live up to their ambition of empowering players to enjoy their games regardless of what piece of plastic, metal and silicon fused components they decide to play on.
Microsoft must make their now impressive library of games available on all platforms; Xboxes and Playstations’, Nintendo Switches’ and Steam Decks, and in the cloud and on phones and VR Goggles and whatever else they can find. Demonstrate leadership by refusing to play by the old rules, and start a new game where for the first time in video game history, consumers can win.
