My second sentence was "but they need to focus on exclusives agains"

Too much flailing around without a plan. It's been all about trying everything and anything and seeing what works, even if it's contradictory. Now they are looking at an expensive gaming PC as their savior? If I had to put money on it, they have dug themselves too deep of a hole, and they're done.

Exclusivity is indeed the elephant in the room; it's hard for games to sell the console when you can play them elsewhere.

Then again, when even the $650 PS5 is facing stalling sales, one has to wonder if even a return to exclusives would sell more than a few million of a much more expensive Helix.

Welp, Helis is rumored to be a hybrid PC console, so I guess it is not salvageable already.

Recent rumors/comments imply that it might be a closed PC (not supporting Steam or EGS), which is terrible for hardware sales, but it kinda makes sense to me since Microsoft don't want to lose their players to Valve or Epic.

Without exclusives, it's not salvageable. Even with "storefront exclusives", they'd need to make cheap hardware options. COD, Minecraft, Diablo, Forza Horizon etc going Xbox exclusive isn't gonna sell enough $1000+ hardware; it would reduce their software sales to a fraction without increasing hardware enough to come close to rivalling Playstation or Steam.

So far a slim majority here think it can be saved; nice to see some optimism nowadays; it's certainly an uphill battle ahead, but hey, crazier things have happened; imagine telling someone in 2015 that the successor to the Wii U would outsell the DS.

People still console warring in 2026?

What would be the financial benefit for Microsoft to enter the console war again? They're doing fine with their 3rd party strategy. They don't need hardware.

Eh, doubt it. It's just so poorly managed that it's done for at this point. The treatment of Xbox has been Microsoft's biggest blunder until their implementations of AI (true of any tech company implementing AI, really).

Because typically: hardware = platform. Platform royalties > internal software profit (maybe unless you're Nintendo).

If Microsot can carve out a path where they'd sell similar 1st party software (on their own platform) to Nintendo + have a similar platform royalties to Playstation, they would easily surpass both.

If Microsoft has a guarantee that the exclusive path will enable them to surpass Playstation, they'd take it in a heartbeat. How do you not understand the relevance of platforms? How is discussing it console warring?

There are cons and pros to each approach. But make no mistake, Microsoft would love to become a big platform. They're hesitant to go with exclusives because they're terrified that the decline in software sales would outweigh the platform growth, and that 90% of their IP's fans outside their platform would look for alternatives (instead of switching platforms for COD, they'd just check out Battlefield or whatever). I mean I too would be terrified. It's one of these "high risk high reward" strategies.

Possibly, but this hole they dug themselves into is going to be hard to escape. I believe the problem lies with exclusivity and general sense that Xbox is a redundant brand. In the U.S., Xbox's best market by far, the XBS was doing about on par with the XBO, at least outside the holidays (probably because big holiday promotional deals like what was the norm last generation were either non-existent or just not very good in comparison). But that completely fell through after the "Everything is an Xbox" campaign that began in the 2024 holidays, followed by making most of their first-party titles available on PS5. You can clearly see that's where the line diverged:

The whole point of exclusives is to entice people to buy a system in order to play games they can't find anywhere else. For example, if you want to play Mario or Zelda you need a Nintendo console. MS's strategy since late 2024 essentially told customers "If you want to play our games, you don't need an Xbox anymore." It was already a big enough mistake to not make the IPs they gained from buying out Zenimax and ABK exclusive to Xbox (or at least timed exclusives), but once you started to see series like Halo, Gears, Forza, and Fable announced for PS5 as well, that was it. Even I was like, "Why should I bother buying their next-gen console if I can just play all of their games on PS6?" I've owned every Xbox console to date because I wanted to play their first-party titles.

MS needs to go back to a policy of having most of their big marquee titles exclusive to Xbox. The traditional first-party pillars they've had for decades should remain exclusives, especially the Halo/Gears/Forza triad. If there is anything they want to make multiplatform (like IPs they bought up like CoD, Doom, etc.), make it a timed exclusive with a large window of exclusivity. If they feel it must come out on PlayStation, make PS owners wait at minimum a year, possibly two. Sony had a similar policy with PC ports of their PS5 games, where said ports were typically a year or two after the PS release (and now they've gone back to total exclusivity except for I think just live-service games and MLB The Show, the latter of which was forced upon them by MLB). They need a strategy that says "We have games you cannot find on PlayStation or Nintendo. Some games will be on offer on those systems, but the wait will be considerable and if you want to play then when they come out you still need an Xbox." Even for PC ports of their games, I'd still wait a year if I were them.

Do whatever it takes to incentivize people to want to own an Xbox the way console makers have always incentivized people to buy their consoles. But if they continue with their current strategy into the coming years, Project Helix will be dead on arrival. Again, why buy the next-gen Xbox if you can just buy all of their games on PS6? MS has suggested that they will do an about face to push for more exclusivity on Xbox, but we'll see if they actually stick to their guns in the coming years. Several 2026 games were already on lock for a PS5 release, so let's see what their 2027 slate looks like. I guess we'll find out more at their big games event coming up soon.