The fact that games being more available on more platforms is seen as a negative, really shows how fundamentally messed up the console market is at its roots. It's not just Xbox porting to PS, there are still people mad at PS for porting to PC and Xbox for supporting PC day one for that matter. The narrative is that without completely exclusive games there's no point in a console existing.... and what?? The powers that be have decided to historically tie their validity on the choice of artificially limiting the availability of first and third party games to often times a single platform in their ecosystem in an attempt to forcibly move hardware. This extends beyond multiplatform and even affects internal hardware. There have been very obvious times when a game could have been cross gen but isn't. We've seen that this generation with games like Ratchet and Clank. We've also seen people get mad at games for being cross gen despite them usually performing better on current gen than current gen only games which... have had problems, and more gamers being on last gen still.
First of all, that's not a sustainable market strategy and we're seeing that. Video games cost money to make and overtime those costs, along with everything else, rise. Exclusives tie their potential success to the total sales of the hardware being shipped. Even Nintendo, if they developed games that cost as much as the rest of the industry's AAA games, wouldn't be able to sustain rising costs with sales on their singular platform. Third parties are pulling out of this strategy entirely. With exclusive software to this degree you're basically making turning it up on hard mode. I mean you both need your console to sell a lot and for your game to sell a lot with the hope that people buy your console to buy your game... and this hasn't really worked. Kinda for Nintendo because they keep their costs low, but not even really for them when you consider how big gaming consoles SHOULD be by this stage. Less than 200m sales in their lifetime is.... bad. Like really bad for how old they are (consoles themselves) and how cheap they are and how they're meant to be the biggest entertainment device. It's really bad for Sony and Microsoft whose consoles also have not significantly grown, but whose game development prices keep skyrocketing. And seriously for what? Let's take Sony for example because they're seen as having the winning strategy compared to Xbox. The first PlayStation sold about 100 million units (released in 1994), the second PlayStation about 150 to 160 million (released in 2000) and remains the best selling console ever, and the fourth PlayStation jumping sold just shy of 120 million units globally. That's horrendous. In 30 years, THIRTY YEARS, hardware sales of Sony's game console has peaked at a 50% increase (or I guess 150%; idk how analysts normally do it... anyway the biggest increase was in the PS2 which had the ps1 sales + half of the ps1 sales as new sales). Now they aren't even seeing those numbers. Now gamers are more active and servicing gamers in past generations gives a higher consumer base overall. The biggest thing is that gamers are far far more valuable with spending being up, but talking about hardware alone... it's all really bad.
This is what I mean when I say the console market has screwed itself. Competition has gone out the window. Growth has gone out the window. Consoles have built these walled gardens where the only visitors are largely THE SAME PEOPLE everytime they build a new exhibit. In a longer span, PCs have blown up with over a billion gamers, and in a much shorter span mobile has blown up with billions of gamers. Cloud as well is anticipated to see huge growth. Consoles have just disappointed all around. The problem is simple: you do not build an empire on the privelege to purchase XYZ. The narrative fans are shouting is even more simple. According to the nobody wants an Xbox or Playstation, they just want the exclusive games. If I owned either platform I'd see this and be royally concerned. They've trained consumers to see the very hardware they purchase, as a fee or deadweight just to get to certain exclusive games. Not as a platform with competitive features that make people WANT to play their favorite games on it.
When you look at other markets, people abhor software based exclusivity on certain hardware. Windows 11 not being available on older PCs is seen as a failure. Subscription Streaming service customers are getting angry at all the originals and exclusives. Smartphone users want their apps to seamlessly be available across devices and even operating systems. Even Apple is playing ball putting their proprietary apps and services on Android and increasing collaboration with Windows instead of just Macs. In other markets people make their choice of what hardware to buy based on unique features and value offerings, and then just have access to largely the same software and services as everyone else. There are a very small amount of outliers, but they aren't as massive as the idea of exclusive AAA video games (both in terms of cost and importance to consumers).
We're in this flux state where non console gamers look at the console market in... well I don't really know, but new people aren't really buying consoles and haven't for a long time, and I think the reason why is clear. Current console gamers are actually angry, at least the vocal ones, at these platforms for attempting to evolve and grow. Console hardware value should be based on the console hardware's capabilities and the features offered by the platform's ecosystem. Not almost entirely on exclusive games or exclusive content. The fact that this isn't the case has taken a massive toll on the console market and the wider industry as a whole (because consoles were meant to be a gateway into gaming, but they've become one of the biggest barriers).
From my perspective, people should be mad at how poorly Xbox is expanding, not that Xbox is expanding at all. The PC app is WAAAAY behind and cloud is a slow burn. Mobile hasn't event taken off because Microsoft is at the whims of courts and Apple and Google. The Xbox Everywhere campaign feels like a joke not because of "Oh no, my exclusives" but because Xbox is just factually not everywhere. Really the Xbox console experience continues to be the only consistently really good one.
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