Xbox Boss Surrenders In The Great Console Wars

For twenty years, a great war has raged. A console war, between the two great powers, Sony and Microsoft. Sure, there were other regional powers in play, such as Nintendo. And it’s true that Sony won nearly every campaign in this war, to varying degrees. But the war raged on right up until this week, when Microsoft appeared to have officially surrendered.

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.

Now, there are still problems to be solved in all of this. Microsoft hasn’t opened every last floodgate to make all their first-party or previously exclusive games cross-platform just yet, for instance. And there are already some very worrying signs that Game Pass itself is entering the early stages of the enshittification process. If Microsoft is going to do this, it had damned well better get it right, given the concession in sales of all that metal and plastic it’s going to relinquish.

But it sure appears as though Microsoft is going to pivot back to a combination of PC gaming and cloud-based Xbox gaming. I subscribe to Game Pass myself and, despite its other problems, the tech works quite well. I would say it actually delivers mostly on the promise of Google’s doomed Stadia product.

Elsewhere in the interview, Spencer further explained that Asia is one of Xbox’s “fastest-growing regions,” and it’s thanks in large part to Cloud Gaming via Game Pass and PC. And according to Spencer, the users driving this are players who were never going to buy an Xbox.

“We were never going to catch that person with our console,” said Spencer. “So let’s find them in a way that works, and it’s better for Indiana Jones. It’s better for Xbox.”

If Microsoft can just manage to pull of a tech product that doesn’t become simultaneously more expensive and shitty at the same time, for once, this could be really good business for the company. The console wars were over long before Xbox surrendered, after all.

And unless we finally get that Russian console that Putin demanded, and so long as Nintendo remains a more niche player, it seems like the war is over for good.