Xbox’s real exclusivity problem is they don’t make games people want – Reader’s Feature

As Xbox comes under criticism for its new policy on exclusive games, a reader argues that the company’s entire games line-up suffers from a lack of must-have titles.

I do feel bad for new Xbox boss Asha Sharma. Xbox has been mismanaged for over a decade and has become increasingly irrelevant this generation, to the point where I’m not sure it can even be saved anymore. Which is crazy to say about a company that owns Activision Blizzard and Bethesda, and is the pet project of a $3 trillion company. But they’ve made so many mistakes, so often, that they’re basically a laughing stock now. Or at least they would be if anyone thought about them that much.

Unfortunately, I have to think about them because I’m an Xbox Series X and boy do I regret that. Obviously, I could sell it (for pennies) and get a PlayStation 5 instead, but all my games and gaming history are tied up in my Xbox account and the thought of starting again from scratch is kind of nightmarish.

I am not a blind fanboy though. Phil Spencer should’ve been got rid of a decade ago but he was able to hang on for far too long, where at the end you could see it in his eyes that he was beaten down and defeated. I don’t know if it was actually all his fault – maybe he was being stopped from doing anything sensible by his bosses – but I do know that every choice he made somehow made the situation worse.

The problem today is that there’s no reason for any sensible person to buy an Xbox console and for those that already have one, unlike me, are selling up or just giving up. So it doesn’t make sense to have exclusive games anymore, because you can’t make your money back on them. But if you don’t have exclusives there’s even less reason to buy the console and you’re in a Catch-22 situation.

For the last few months Microsoft has been hinting about bringing back exclusives, but because that doesn’t make any sense no one believed them. Then, at the Xbox Game Showcase, they announced that Gears Of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution are going to be exclusives, but nothing else is.

They’ve point blank refused to say why those games and not others and then started insisting that they never even planned to release E-Day on PlayStation 5, even though they very clearly did. Why they thought it was important to push that story I don’t know but then there’s not much that does make sense with Xbox nowadays.

It’s all very silly but it is impossible to understand why those games, particularly Gears Of War, considering the remaster of the first game came out on PlayStation 5 last year. Some people, including GC, have suggested that Microsoft think E-Day won’t be a particularly big hit and so it can be sacrificed to please hardcore Xbox fans. I’m not convinced, but I can’t think of any other reason that doesn’t involve just throwing a dart at a dart board.

I definitely don’t think E-Day will do that well on PlayStation 5 and I doubt Halo: Campaign Evolved will either. Maybe it’ll do okay, with PlayStation owners being curious, but the heyday of Halo was 20 years ago and it’s a long time since it’s been a killer app for anything. Maybe Fable will do well next year, if it’s good, but I don’t think it’s particularly likely.

The only game that Xbox has really got is Forza Horizon 6 which did not even get mentioned at all for PlayStation 5 in any of the summer showcases. Of course there’s Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Call Of Duty but Bethesda work at the speed of a crushed snail (and their last game was pretty bad anyway) while Call Of Duty has never been less popular.

So you’ve got the problem that Xbox is a games company where nobody wants to buy their console and only a small percentage of their games are anything anyone cares about. I don’t know how you turn that size of a problem around quickly and I think the fact that you obviously can’t is what Asha Sharma has been trying to tell us this week.

I honestly don’t know if Xbox is going to last this generation and I wouldn’t be surprised if her report to her overlords was that she thought Xbox was beyond broken and might as well just be sold off for parts. And I’m not sure she’d be wrong.

By reader Ashton Marley

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