Why doesn’t Microsoft want people to buy an Xbox console? – Reader’s Feature-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is not an Xbox exclusive (Bethesda)

A reader is confused by the recent Xbox game announcements that seem to be encouraging people not to buy Microsoft’s console.

I’m sure we’ve all seen the news this week, about Indiana Jones And The Great Circle coming to PlayStation 5, and Xbox boss Phil Spencer doing his best not to explain anything. My first takeaway from it all is that Spencer has to go. He should’ve gone years ago but him and his cronies have been absolutely terrible for Xbox and the weird thing is they’re getting worse over time, not better.

Nothing they say seems to stay the same from one minute to the next and they don’t seem to care or acknowledge how stupid it all looks to everyone else, even to hardcore Xbox fans, which I once considered myself to be.

Now though, Xbox is not a console manufacturer, not in any way that matters. They’ve been Dreamcasted, they are an ex-console maker. Sure, they’ll continue to sell consoles and have some kind of next gen machine but only because, as with everything else, they can’t admit the truth of the situation to themselves or anyone else.

The thing many people have latched onto is that Microsoft has three Bethesda games out at the moment, all of which have completely different exclusivity plans: Starfield is an Xbox console exclusive, Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is now a timed exclusive, and Doom: The Dark Ages is multiformat from the start.

As you see, all of that looks very random, and it makes it impossible to understand why the decisions have been made or how you’d use them to predict what will happen to future games. Why was Starfield not brough to PlayStation 5 months ago – considering it didn’t as well as expected and it’s got DLC coming up, which would be the perfect jumping on point?

And why isn’t Indiana Jones going to be multiformat from the start, considering it’s clearly going to be a flop on just Xbox? Also, why is Avowed, which is not a Bethesda game and is clearly going to do even worse, not multiformat at all? None of it seems to make any sense.

Spencer has said they’ll look at things on a case-by-case basis, which is fine in theory but the implication of that, I would’ve thought, is that you’d understand the logic behind each decision. Rather than it seeming like they were just picking random numbers out of a hat.

Microsoft has no idea what it’s doing. It’s making things up as it’s going along, and it seems like it’s purposefully trying to put people off from buying an Xbox. Why would you announce that Indiana Jones is coming to PlayStation 5 early next year? The only thing that is going to do is stop anyone that was thinking of getting an Xbox, or subscribing to Game Pass, from doing so.

Many people have pointed this out, so I can’t see how Microsoft could have not realised. But why would they do it? Are they look for excuses to exit the console business? Either they’re being very stupid or very convoluted or, more probably, both.

It may take a while for it to become literally true but Xbox has already gone third party. There’s no other future for them. Their consoles sell less every generation and they’re ditching this one halfway through already. That will make them the biggest third party publisher in the West but that’s still a massive comedown from everything Xbox was meant to be when it started.

Xbox will still have influence, just like EA does and Activision Blizzard did, but it’s no longer a format, it no longer has its own identity. It’s just a shell of its former self that could’ve been so much more with better people in charge.

By reader Mulkey

Xbox is going through some changes (Microsoft)

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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