Xbox and PlayStation disagree on the future of the forever game
Now that the dust has settled on Xbox and PlayStation’s big summer showcases, it’s a good time to compare them and look for evidence of where each company is going – or thinks it is going.
As has increasingly been the case in recent years, the two presentations were very different.
Most observers believe that Xbox had the better show, in terms of the number and range of titles shown and the promise of its future slate. But there’s only so much you can read into this – the most plausible conclusion is simply that post-pandemic production problems hit Sony’s family of studios a year or so later than Microsoft and Ubisoft, creating a gap between the spider man 2 and distant prospects like Bungie’s Marathon. Like its rival this summer, Sony will likely recover in a year’s time.
It’s more interesting to look at the content of the games on display, and what they can tell us about the priorities of the two platform holders.
There’s no doubting what Sony is up to. The PlayStation owner has spoken out about his desire to get into the live-service games business in a big way, and how this will affect the acquisition of Destination creator Bungie. See, in terms of new reveals from first-party PlayStation studios, the showcase gave us:
Little is known about these games, however Marathon is explicitly set up as a long-term “living” game, and it doesn’t seem hard to tell Fairgame$ And Agreement in the same bucket. There is also a striking tonal and genre similarity between these projects. Sony seems keen to exploit Bungie’s heritage by leaning hard on genres and styles that have proven to draw an audience of service games on PlayStation – particularly sci-fi shooters.
(Even more specifically: sci-fi shooters that remind you of Destination. Fairgame$ tends more towards Overexpectedbut you get the idea.)
This isn’t to say Sony is turning its back on its stock of polished, cinematic single-player action games: spider man 2The game’s impressive demo belies that, and this is the company that owns Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, and Santa Monica Studio. But there is still a clear trend.
In contrast, these were the new first-party games revealed during the Xbox showcase:
- South of Midnightan occult narrative game set in the American South
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024an expansion of the celebrated sim with more game-like elements (plus a dune-themed expansion for the original)
- A Monkey Island themed expansion for the pirate service game Sea of thieves
- Clockwork revolutiona steampunk role-playing game where you travel through time
Microsoft also offered updates Fable, Granted, Hellblade 2And Star field – all single player games, mostly substantial RPGs, but stylistically very different from each other.
This shouldn’t mean that Microsoft doesn’t want to make multiplayer shooters – although it will probably take some time to lick its wounds due to the horribly mismanaged failure to make Halo a popular service game with Halo infinitynot to mention Arkane’s failed launch redfall. But if Sony’s first-party efforts fall broadly into two categories — games that look like Naughty Dog made them, and games that look like Bungie made them — Microsoft’s are clearly much harder to categorize. A few console generations ago, Sony’s first-party studios were the creative risk-takers with diverse output, while Microsoft purposefully pursued the Halo crowd. Now the tables seem to have turned.
What happened? It’s unlikely it’s just a matter of taste; these are businesses and they go where the money is. Is the money really in such different places for the two of them?
The short answer is yes. PlayStation is a product company and it is the largest source of income for its parent company, Sony. It needs each of its games to make money.
In today’s economy, and the risk-averse atmosphere in entertainment in general, that means you have to be sure of your bets – whether it’s mass-market action games with high production values that can command a $70 sticker price at scale, or service games. that are aimed entirely at PlayStation’s core audience (and monetize them).
Xbox is now a service company, specifically a Game Pass company. A gaming subscription that extends beyond the console ecosystem to reach players on PCs and phones has been at the heart of Xbox’s strategy for years. But, paradoxically, the fact that the division’s main product is a service makes it easier for Microsoft to release smaller, standalone games-as-products — and even take a different approach to its own service games.
What the Game Pass business model requires is a fairly large number of new games; enough variety in content to attract new users, especially those who don’t have consoles yet; and above all a high level of involvement with the games as a whole, which ensures satisfied customers. But because each game isn’t (only) considered its own revenue-generating unit and is instead judged largely in terms of happy players, Xbox can be more relaxed about the design of each game and not have to min-max those games. ‘ marketing or business models to the same extent.
Sea of thieves And Flight simulator are monetized far less aggressively than other games in their relative spaces, and they can be updated in new, appropriate ways, whether that be through an in-game crossover event or an expansion-sequel hybrid that would be a much riskier bet without the convenient Game Pass umbrella to group everything together. Forza Horizon 5 has seasons to keep players engaged, but not required to implement a battle pass to strip those season players for cash; for Microsoft, the hours played are enough. A huge, emerging, but insular sandbox-like one Star field which can entertain players for hundreds of hours with a single download is on paper the opposite of a service game – but within the Game Pass system it sort of becomes one.
In an interview with Polygon this week, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer laid it all out very clearly. “Having a content subscription that scales means I don’t have to think about every game monetizing every engagement,” said Spencer. “Because the success of Xbox Game Pass allows us to invest more in driving engagement than in driving the dollars. The dollars will come from people who love the games they play. So it opens up opportunities for us to not be so incremental to each piece of content in terms of how we charge. As a leading influence, he pointed to the company’s long experience with Minecraft, an evolving, living game that doesn’t pollute its gargantuan audience. (It’s “a space where we learn a lot,” he said.)
The key, for Spencer, is flexibility: “For a creator, you can say, ‘What am I trying to do? And is there a business model on this platform that allows me to do that?’ And we want that answer to be almost always yes.” The logic applies just as much to narrative adventures like South of Midnight. “If a game’s design doesn’t beg for a business model within the game, we can just say, ‘Go build your game.’ The Game Pass platform has a business model that these great single player narrative games fit into.”
This all sounds very nice for both players and developers. The question is whether it is sustainable. At one point, Spencer brushed aside comparisons to video streaming platforms like Netflix’s struggle to make their lavish spending on content meaningful, saying that players care less about the amount of new games than they do about platforms “putting together a great portfolio for them”. But Spencer later said that he and Xbox Game Studios chief Matt Booty have set a goal of four AAA releases a year, which, given Booty’s claim that the development cycle of such games takes up to six years each makes for an intimidating schedule. You can see why Microsoft has acquired so many studios.
For now, there’s nothing to worry about, says Spencer; as Xbox accounts for only 10% of Microsoft’s revenue, it can afford to focus more on growth than profitability – unlike PlayStation. And Spencer sees an opportunity in the “hundreds of millions” of PC owners that make up Game Pass’s potential audience outside of consoles. The extent to which this untapped audience actually exists will determine whether Microsoft’s more relaxed approach to making games is the future, or just a pleasant blip.