They surrendered when they thought day one console buyers and people who liked gimmicky dance game peripherals were one and the same, and never really caught back up.

Since then they’ve been pushing Game Pass hard, but that mythical era where you’d just need a TV, internet and a gamepad just never arrived for them. Streaming games is probably fine for a lot of casual gamers, but the casual gamers are already on mobile and tend to spend very little on games. Far too little for Game Pass Ultimate to make sense for them.

And I’m really unconvinced that day one Game Pass games are sustainable. Even with their piss-poor output over the last few years.

I also don’t like that games are no longer going down much in price over time. It seems everyone is far too happy to leave things at launch price to make subscriptions and crap sales seem like better value.

so long as Nintendo remains a more niche player

???

Microsoft needs to merge their ecosystems and make the Xbox a PC Game console for your tv. I shouldn’t own 2 different units that have Microsoft operating systems that can’t use the same software in 2025. Xboxes should be PCs that run Xbox games. Make a forked version of Windows that’s TV friendly and have the ability to “boot” into a version of Windows that users can run their own PC games on.

I understand how tricky that can be for piracy and whatnot, but there’s gotta be a better way by now. At the very least, Xbox should include Steam/Epic games integration.

Relevant bit

Over the weekend, Spencer sat down for a lengthy interview with XboxEra in which he discussed his favorite games, talked about what various Xbox studios are working on, and dished on the industry at large. And he was also honest about Xbox no longer being part of any console war, as it shifts to selling Xbox games on other consoles, like PlayStation.

“I would love to make all of the money for all of the games that we ship, right? Like, obviously we make more on our own platform,” said Spencer. “It’s one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important. But there are people, whether it’s their libraries on a PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there.”

“I’m not trying to move them all over to Xbox anymore,” added Spencer.

Now, I don’t expect that to mean the sudden cessation of manufacturing of current Xbox hardware. I’m not entirely sure I believe that any of this means we won’t get another generation of the console at some point, either.

But I can see that happening. And everyone can already see how Microsoft has begun to pivot away from focusing on its console, has begun a far greater foray into cloud gaming through the Xbox Game Pass platform, and it has even begun moving away from the exclusivity we wrung our hands over months ago

Microsoft has always been the niche player here. Nintendo is usually the one on top when you look at the actual numbers.

The great one was Sega vs Nintendo, this was a sequel. A noticeable and impactful war but not the ‘great’ one.