All these takes saying how Xbox will recover the glory (which they seem to believe rubs off on themselves) IF ONLY... full exclusivity...
Except it wasn´t that long ago that Xbox did have full exclusivity... and what was the result?
Declining market share which prompted MS to see multplat publishing as the way forward.
None of the people proposing this can even give a back of the napkin take on how much value their proposal would destroy.
But hey, maybe they will feel a little bit happier when MS announces a Xbox console exclusive cosmetic, or ¨Asha´s #1 fan¨ sock collection.
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I think people just have a hard time engaging with the present day reality, stuck on decades old sentiment about a brand.
The value of Xbox as console is just really dubious, and certainly not worth destroying the value in multiplat game sales.
Sure, having their own niche store is OK to the extent it bypasses Steam or Sony taking their cut,
and they probably have more sales volume than e.g. Epic Game Store, but they also have a lot more costs than Epic
and they just haven´t demonstrated ability to grow, and in fact have a shrinking core market for this niche.
In contrast, their game studios are actually pretty successfull, and would be more so with full multiplat distribution.
I honestly think the Zenimax and ABK purchases simply don´t justify the premium paid - even if they stuck with full multiplat,
and MS would have unlocked more value by selling off it´s existing Xbox Game Studios to outside publisher or publishers.
Since MS didn´t really need the money per se, they could have gotten better valuation by selling it for shares (not cash).
I can see how ¨peer¨ console platform owners like Sony and Nintendo can make exclusivity work well but that depends
on scale and market share which MS has simply lost even while they still had full exclusivity in 1st party games.
And personally, I think both Sony and Nintendo would benefit from more ¨case by case¨ multiplat than they are currently doing.
(and Sony rationalizing dropping multiplat because certain titles don´t sell well enough outside of Playstation isn´t actually
a great thing, and should point to them developing games which would sell well to broader audience instead of just being Playstation fodder)
