Xbox leaving the games industry would be better for everyone – Reader’s Feature

It wasn’t the new consoles or Bethesda’s games line-up that interested me the most but the various emails from top execs, that give an insight into how Microsoft works and thinks. The Nintendo one was very damning, in terms of Xbox boss Phil Spencer’s image, as it shows him arrogantly claiming to know better than Nintendo and assuming that at some point they’ll come round to his way of thinking.

He doesn’t come across any better in the transcript where he’s talking about Microsoft’s long term plans and what he’ll do if they don’t hit their targets for Games Pass subscribers. Petulantly, he says Microsoft will just leave the games industry, which I don’t believe for a minute… but I wish it was true.

The problem with talking about one console manufacturer over another is that you open yourself up to accusations of fanboyism. And I’ll say right away that the only Xbox console I’ve ever owned is the Xbox 360 and I’m not a particular fan of any of their exclusives. Halo and Gears Of War are fine but I certainly wouldn’t buy a new console to play them.

I might not be predisposed towards Xbox, but I do not like to think of myself as a PlayStation fanboy and find Sony’s attitude and lack of communication over the last 12 months to be borderline insulting. We shouldn’t have favourites when it comes to soulless corporations and yet I can’t help but feel that Microsoft is a much more malign influence on the games industry than Sony or Nintendo.

They’ve acted that way right from the start, when they gave their first console the codename Midway – after the US battle against the Japanese in WWII – and they admitted they were only entering the games industry in order to stop Sony from ‘taking over the living room.’

That indifference towards gaming itself has, I think, always been obvious, even though I’m sure there’s plenty of people that work for Xbox that do genuinely care about games. As a whole though Microsoft’s approach has always been destructive, rather than constructive.

The near collapse of the Japanese development community in the Xbox 360 era was not a coincidence, but a result of Microsoft trying to sideline those developers and publishers that were natural Sony allies and trying to push primarily American studios and software technology.

Their big push for the Xbox One was TV and digital-only, always-online gaming. Thankfully the general public rejected it but if they hadn’t then Microsoft would’ve destroyed second-hand sales and made internet connections mandatory years before it was sensible to do so (it arguably still isn’t, even now).

And then we get into the current generation and their most destructive efforts so far; buying up publishers for revoltingly huge amounts of money, with a total indifference to the predictable side effects – all the while acting hyper aggressively towards anyone that dares try to stop them, including sending top execs to bend the ear of British MPs.

This is despite the fact that Microsoft has got an ongoing problem with poor management, that has ground work to a crawl at several of the smaller developers they already own. Activision Blizzard is in a state already – that’s the whole reason they’re cheap enough for Microsoft to buy – and the mess of mismanagement they’re going to make is so predictable it’s almost funny. Almost.

There are lots of counters to these arguments but to my mind they’re easily refuted. ‘Sony would do the same if they had the chance,’ is a common one. That’s true, if they were the world’s richest company they probably would do the same thing, and they would be wrong too. But they’re nowhere near that big and their track record over the last 29 years shows they do not and cannot do the same thing (for their part, history shows Nintendo is even less likely to buy up other companies).

The other argument is that competition is good, which is often used as an excuse to let companies do whatever they want. Even if you accept it’s true, I’m sure the gap that Xbox would leave behind would be filled by another company, with Google and Amazon the most likely to try first.

Then you get straight into the argument that, ’Google or Amazon would be worse.’ Well, maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. We don’t know how they’d act in a world without Xbox, but they’re just as rich as Microsoft, more or less, and despite their obvious interest in gaming they haven’t made any purchases that are anywhere near as disruptive.

Instead of signing cheques for $69 billion they’ve instead followed Nintendo and Sony’s approach of buying small or medium-sized studios and turning them into exactly what they need, not just buying up huge cornerstones of the industry in one giant purchase.

This, as the evidence shows, is the most sensible and sustainable strategy to becoming a big deal in gaming, whereas Microsoft’s bull in a china shop approach is not only needlessly destructive but has never been proven to work. Xbox has come dead last three generations in a row and if they were to just quit and give up before the next one I wouldn’t shed a single tear.

By reader Lobo

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