Speaking yesterday during the Official Xbox Podcast (embedded below), the head of Xbox at Microsoft, Phil Spencer, clarified the direction of the Xbox business in the face of confirming rumors of "four Xbox exclusives" coming to PS5 and Switch.
In an internal memo covered this morning by The Verge, Phil Spencer further explained, "We have a different vision for the future of gaming. A future where players have a unified experience across devices. [...] A future where every screen is an Xbox." Phil Spencer referred to Xbox as "our gaming platform and content business" when speaking to The Verge, which they note isn't them using the word "console" at all.
So, is the future of Xbox hardware up in the air? For now, not likely. The tone of the Official Xbox Podcast below is generally optimistic for the Xbox business, particularly in the face of Microsoft's costly $69 billion dollar acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, making them the largest game publisher on any game platform.
Based on information gleaned from the Podcast, Microsoft isn't quite rushing to the door of the console hardware space just yet. The money that has been spent on Acti-Bliz to expand their dominance in console gaming and will continue to make from that deal isn't quite characteristic with, say, the struggling Sega of the '90s and 2000s.
While Xbox has stepped into Sega's console industry shoes in many ways (frequent Top 2 contender, some true Sega-Xbox exclusives, and porting to competing platforms), it remains its own thing, for now. Phil Spencer states that the upcoming releases of four titles will serve as a testing ground for future Xbox ports to PS5 and Switch but clarifies that it's not an indicator all Xbox titles will one day be available on those platforms.
It does seem like there's a lot of money to be made for Xbox on PS5 and Switch, though. It'll be interesting to see how this business model ultimately balances out for Microsoft. Is it okay for Xbox hardware to falter if Xbox software flourishes on other platforms and still makes them money in some way?
For what it's worth, Xbox still seems dedicated to console hardware. One way in which it has excelled at that (which is touched upon in the podcast) is the approach to game preservation via Xbox and Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility for Xbox One and Series consoles. Multiple generations of (patch-required, but still) backward compatibility make modern Xbox platforms compelling for physical game collectors who want their games to work between consoles.
For example, Sonic Unleashed is a 2008 PS3/360 game that genuinely pushed phenomenal graphics for its time. But that same game also regularly dropped below 30 FPS on its native console hardware because the engine demands were simply too ambitious for that generation of consoles to handle.
Fast forward to 2020, 12 years later. The only ways to play Sonic Unleashed at a stable 30 FPS or higher are to either use very in-development Xbox 360 emulation or use Sonic Generations mods for the PC port. But in November 2021, Microsoft added FPS Boost to several Xbox 360 games being played on Xbox Series consoles— including Unleashed- finally making it possible to play the game at 60 FPS on consoles 13 years after it was released.
