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Kyuu on 11 July 2025
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only777 said:
Kyuu said:

I predicted it was going to be more one-sided than the previous generation, but that was before they acquired Bethesda and ABK which no one saw coming, and before we knew anything about COVID consequences and rising prices.

After the acquisitions, it got harder for me to predict anything, because MS could choose any route they wanted and all of them would've made sense. They can return to exclusives for the long term benefit, or go full 3rd party.

Well it's not like anyone back in 2020 could have predicited the complete wipe out of Xbox as a hardware platform.

Oh no, wait;  that's excatly what I said:

Actually you were more positive than I was at that time lol. I didn't even rule out the possibility of Xbox discarding generations with Series SX following some comments Microsoft made a couple of years prior. Some people believed the One X would be "forward compatible" and I too thought that was a possibility  Microsoft's messaging was all over the place!

I also found it likely that MS would turn Xbox into a branded PC. But I somewhat lost confidence in these predictions when MS acquired Zenimax and ABK (this is the part that no one really predicted. A few people did predict the endlessly rising prices and I wasn't one of them). Series S was widely available in a time where the PS5's shortages didn't seem to end, which gave the illusion that Xbox wasn't as far behind as I thought it would be.

Fastforward and today Microsoft is easily the biggest software maker of the big 3. They are more than capable of "making Xbox great again". But it seems like they primarily want to be a 3rd party publisher, and I'm glad they are, because I would have been pissed that the only way they could beat Sony is via pure brute force amidst incompetence. Incompetence shouldn't be rewarded.

The sad part in all of this is that having owned Mojang, Zenimax, and ABK can mean they will close more studios and bury more IP's. It wouldn't surprise me if Gears and potentially even Halo are next. On the bright side, Forza Horizon 5 is doing amazing on PS5 for a late port, so maybe Gears and Halo can see a healthy boost as well from accessing Playstation's playerbase. Forza Horizon is really big on every system its on.