In another era, after a roundup of games like the one shown by Microsoft in its most recent conference, the Redmond giant would have brazenly cut the price of its flagship console to relaunch its sales. However, we are in 2024, and all the potential seen will remain at least for a while inside an imaginary green Xbox pressure cooker and increasingly on the verge of exploding.
Xbox Direction
The Microsoft console has turned into an unsustainable limit in the space of a few months and, even worse, no one really seems to know what to do with it. Phil Spencer himself is not clear: first he announces that the consoles are outdated, then people stop buying them and change their minds, then the first portings on Nintendo and Sony platforms are announced with the promise that they will not be the last.
Microsoft’s latest response? Propose to the public more expensive hardware than the consoles that are on the market today and whose sales have collapsed for some time. In this chaos there is also an interest in a possible portable Xbox whose usefulness we really struggle to understand given that, in addition to smartphones and tablets, there are already handheld PCs that allow access to the Xbox ecosystem and beyond.
Relief valves
Today, when the games are finally arriving and the competition is almost silent, Microsoft’s gaming supply chain finds itself without its own showcase in which to display the goods. The only relief valves are the PC, then Xbox apps and Steam (an even more fitting name in this case), but to support projects like Starfield and Indiana Jones it cannot be enough, and it is natural to expect that the games in the future will be made to overflow towards the next Nintendo and PlayStation consoles precisely to avoid the cauldron in which all these development studies boil over and finally explode. In the meantime the public doesn’t move, why should they? PC users can already play everything or almost everything, and at no additional cost, PlayStation users can hopefully await new portings and so can those who will throw themselves headlong into the Switch’s successor.
Nintendo Playbox
Until proven otherwise, Microsoft’s next-gen is in the plans, but who will it turn to and what will it have to offer to support the enormous investment made on the software side? If he were a bodybuilder, today Xbox would have the legs of an Austrian crawler with the torso and shoulders of a Filipino fighter on top. How to compensate? We would need amazing hardware, or an amazing operating system perhaps structured around the AI in which Microsoft has invested so much, but where are you going with these prices? Some enthusiasts are already dreaming of a sort of Microsoft-branded Steam Machine, but why should Xbox host Valve, giving it visibility and further earnings?
Why is Doom coming to PlayStation, but not Indiana Jones? It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Above all, you can’t decide on a case-by-case basis after you’ve bought almost half of the big publishers out there; you can’t leave fans hanging by a thread who try to follow their favorite series which could become exclusive tomorrow or not depending on the phases of the moon and Satya Nadella’s rheumatism. PlayStation is also increasingly a publisher, but in the meantime it has made the public understand that PS5 is a certainty and not a console that could dissolve in the space of a showcase.
Fog of War
The new medieval Doom, possible pearls like Mixtape, the potential of Avowed and the charisma of Fable, the wonder of Flight Simulator, the depth of State of Decay 3 and the amazement in front of Perfect Dark (for having closed Arkane, it must really give it a track to Dishonored)… we witnessed a less diluted show than last year but much more concrete and exciting.
It’s a shame that it was dedicated to an imaginary console, of which we know the past but cannot frame the present or distinguish the future. Of Phil Spencer’s great strategy, either a piece is still missing that doesn’t allow us to understand where they really want to go, or something has happened in the meantime that has upset their plans. The only other possibility is that this strategy was leaking from the beginning, but for the moment we want to try to exclude this while impatiently waiting for future developments that can finally sweep away this thick fog of war.
