Until recently, much of the conversation surrounding consoles has always been focused on exclusives, and a significant selling point behind certain consoles has been the exclusives they offer.
However, Phil Spencer says this conversation has gotten old, and so has the narrow-minded focus. Microsoft is choosing to break free from it by opening up its Xbox consoles to other digital storefronts such as Epic Games Store and Itch.io.
Earlier this year, we already started to see the signs that Xbox was doing away with exclusives when rumours (which turned out to be true) hit the interwebs of Xbox-exclusive titles, making a move to PlayStation. And while it was only a tiny amount of more minor titles, it did materialise.
In the same interview that confirmed the Xbox-to-PlayStation pipeline, Phil Spencer said that over the next five to 10 years, console-exclusive games will be a smaller part of the games industry.
This notion that Xbox can only be this one device that plugs into a television isn’t something we see in the Gen Z research. Because nothing else is like that for them.
Some of them will have an iPhone, some will have an Android, but all the games and everything is the same. I can still get to TikTok on both of them, at least for now.
All of their stuff is available wherever they want. So for Xbox, our brand pivot—as we attract and maintain relevance with a younger audience—is ‘Xbox is a place where I can find the great games I want to?’
Considering our history as the Windows company, nobody would blink twice if I said, ‘Hey, when you’re using a PC, you get to decide the type of experience you have by picking where to buy games. There’s real value in that.
Phill Spencer also said that he feels he’s more a continuous part of a gaming ecosystem as a whole when gaming on PC. On consoles, though, his gaming is kind of sharded—to use a gaming term—based on these different closed ecosystems he has to cross.
Also, in the same interview, Phil Spencer mentioned that while PC and mobile gaming are growing, the console market is not, and subsidising the cost of console production to boost revenues through game sales isn’t necessarily viable in the long run.
But now I want to hear from you. Would opening up the Xbox be enough to make the console viable again? Let me know in the comments.