Not going to lie, I'm feeling pretty down today. While I personally don't care all that much about ABK games and getting them into the first party and onto Gamepass, having the acquisition rejected over absolute bullshit nonsense Cloud concerns just makes me angry at the injustice of it all. The amount of power that Sony has a market leader is astounding, the various regulators of the world have said they are allowed to a. make timed and full exclusivity deals for tons of AAA 3rd party games b. pay 3rd party developers to specifically skip a release on Xbox only (all other platforms allowed 6 months or a year after the Sony release, but Xbox release is blocked for life), c. pay 3rd parties to release exclusive content within games (exclusive characters, exclusive quests, early beta access, early demo access, etc.), meanwhile all the while Sony is allowed to keep acquiring things for their own 1st party. Xbox tries to acquire a publisher to better compete with Sony, is willing to sign 10 year deals to keep releasing that publisher's games on other platforms including PS, and they're still not allowed to do that, they say it's because of Cloud but it feels like a convenient excuse seeing as Xbox has no Cloud gaming monopoly and there is no evidence that ABK would give them one, feels like their real concern is with Xbox being able to compete with Sony, can't have that.
Honestly it's hard to feel any hope for the future of Xbox at this point, I just see so many L's when I think about Xbox and their prospects for the future:
- Xbox is losing the hardware war right now by a greater margin than they did last gen, in spite of everything they have done to improve their position in the market since last gen (acquisitions, natural 1st party growth and expansion, Gamepass, trying harder in niche markets, etc.). With Xbox now saying they expect the shortages to continue, we are looking at PS5 doubling Xbox Series before the end of the year, way faster than it took PS4 to double XB1. There is no way that Xbox can recover from falling that far behind in hardware, and Xbox will suffer the fallout from allowing it for the rest of the gen, with that big of a lead over Xbox Sony will be able to cheaply keep moneyhatting 3rd party AAA's off of Xbox the remainder of the generation (while any attempts by MS to hat games will come with huge price tags like the $100m Xbox reportedly had to pay for Tomb Raider last gen), indies and niche Japanese devs will remain hesitant to port to Xbox, Sony will have much higher mindshare, etc.
- Phil's vision for what he wants Xbox to be just doesn't closely align with what I want Xbox to be anymore. He strongly favors indie deals for Gamepass, which I rarely play indies, meanwhile the AAA and JP deals I want to see landing regularly on Gamepass don't come anywhere near as often as I'd like to see them, certainly alot less often than we see them on Sony's PS+ competitor service. It feels like he cares more about things like growing PC and Cloud, horizontal expansion as Jez called it in his article, than he cares about vertical expansion, focusing on growth of Xbox's core console market. I'm disappointed by the huge lacking of custom console and controller designs compared to last gen, disappointed by Xbox's lackluster pricing and bundling strategy so far this gen. I'm disappointed by his lackluster efforts in Japan. I will forever be thankful to Phil for turning things around for Xbox as much as he did, but I'm no longer sure he is the best person for the job, for instance his rumored hands off leadership style, some of these 1st party studios seem to need firm guidance from above and aren't getting it.
- So many things feel outdated on Xbox, from the UI, to the achievements system, to the Game DVR, and we have no idea when improvements will be coming. And don't even get me started on the lackluster Xbox marketing.
- We keep hearing stories about the ID@Xbox team blocking games from releasing on Xbox, usually because they are unhappy with the content of a game and decide to play censor, which I'm not a fan of at all.
- It feels like even smaller future acquisitions such as Sega for instance have a good chance of being blocked for equally BS reasons now
