Seriously, how the heck is Ryan McCaffrey IGN's Xbox writing team head and head of their Xbox podcast? This dude doesn't even like Xbox at all. Was just looking at his tweets from yesterday defending Sony's hatting of FF16, meanwhile here is what he tweeted about Tomb Raider back in 2014:

Truly disgraceful takes.

The difference is in his wording. He refused to acknowledge that the FF16 deal was bad for FF fans on Xbox and PC, only saying that it was good for Sony, yet his first and only take on Tomb Raider was that it was only good for "petty fanboys". That's textbook hypocrisy. Either timed hat deals are bad for everyone, or they're not a bad thing at all, you can't have it both ways depending on which platform is doing it.

Personally, I think timed hat deals are bad for everyone. But clearly Sony is not going to stop doing them, and Nintendo is still doing them as well (Disgaea 6 was just announced as Switch exclusive in the west). That is why I think it's time for Phil to give up his moral high ground on this and start the big moneyhats again, your morality doesn't sell consoles and it's hurting Xbox fans in the end, the less Xbox hardware that sells as a result of Sony having more big exclusives than Xbox thanks to hatting, the harder it is going to be to convince devs to support Xbox in the future, which means even less games for Xbox in the future. 

And that is exactly why Xbox needs to draw the line here, before it is too late.

The more exclusives Sony hats now, the more PS5 sells compared to Xbox Series, and the larger the sales disparity between PS5 and Xbox Series grows, the cheaper it will be for Sony to hat more games away from Xbox in the future. Phil has to stop Sony in their tracks now, early gen, before PS5 pulls so far ahead of Xbox Series that he dooms Xbox gamers to 2nd class citizen status for the entire generation. It is absolutely worth the money to do it. Studio acquisitions are nice and all, and they should absolutely be spending alot of money on them, but any studios they acquire now won't have Xbox exclusives ready for years and years, that is far too late to stop PS5 from pulling massively into the lead. Xbox needs a mix of moneyhatted exclusives in the short game and big studio acquisitions for the long game in order to have any chance of success this generation, it's a shame that Phil doesn't seem to see that.

Yeah, he also praised Sony for doing a 180 on their "we believe in generations" policy yesterday, despite criticizing Xbox for their cross-gen policy just a month or so ago. Ryan really outed himself as a grade A hypocrit yesterday.

Well, even though the common sense says that it's totally correct, I wouldn't expect Xbox to do this even if it hurts them long term. They just seem to be going their own way even though some of the steps they make completely make no sense but still. Expecting them to counter Sony on such deals is setting yourself up for disappointment. Also, we had rumors that they tried to do the same, but given the current difference in userbase, the price they have to pay for such deals is huge that they seem to think it doesn't worth it.