Have you noticed something awful happening with the Xbox One? I mean, there’s actually not a lot happening at the moment with the Xbox One. It’s become in recent years a glorified Blue-ray player and soon enough the big highlight will be Gears of War 5… Yay. Microsoft wants their games to branch on both consoles and PC, it begs the question, why? This tactic is killing a major selling point for their console. Halo 5 is console exclusive yet everything else isn’t? Gears of War and Forza are big selling series and of course, you sell more units if you put them on PC. But, aren’t you meant to be selling consoles?
People are turning over to PC gaming as you can build a good rig or buy a decent gaming laptop for a few hundred bucks. Why invest in a console that has very few exclusives?
Microsoft: Exclusively Lacking
There are no exclusives. Anything coming out has been massively disappointing including Sea of Thieves, Recore and Forza 5. These have been games which showed great potential but came up short. These titles include Halo 5 and the pretty meh Gears of War 4. Other titles are vanishing including the formerly known Black Tusk Studios’ Spy game, Project Spark, Fable Legends, and Scalebound. And IPs like Battletoads, Conker, Perfect Dark, Sunset Horizon, Alan Wake and more are not getting revived in a time where gamers want them!
Still, we have Crackdown 3 to look forward too right? … Right!? What’s happened with Crackdown 3? I don’t think it’ll live up to the hype and Microsoft know this. Now the game Screamride did have some impressive physics. I thought if they got implemented into Crackdown 3, this could work. The original was great for its time and was a lot of fun. But now a year after it’s official EA presentation and we’re still waiting in the dark, which is not good.
Sony and Nintendo own the market with some captivating, story-driven, single player exclusives. And while Microsoft has an edge on timed exclusives, there’s very little to get hyped about. I hope State of Decay 2 will be good and it’s looking promising, but even so, it won’t be enough to save the console.
What Needs To Change
What Microsoft needs to do to survive this console war is simple, make more exclusive content. I mean actual exclusives which are good! I understand that everyone loves Gears of War. Let it die. It’s not heading in any direction worthy of resurrecting again. At least Uncharted 4 took some drastic steps to change things up. Gears of War 4 is too safe and while not a bad game, does very little to warrant it’s existence.
Microsoft isn’t taking risks and it’s killing their console slowly. Taking risks do pay off as shown by Sony, Nintendo and even certain publishers like Capcom take big risks with their games and it pays off, investing in developers to produce games that get people talking. Scalebound was one of them, that for some reason Microsoft stopped funding. So it’s find to spend over a billion to own Minecraft (yet not make it exclusive in some way) and spend money on other things such as time exclusives but for an actual exclusive you don’t bother? I remember when GTA 4 was in its prime and Microsoft spent tens of millions of dollars just to have the expansion DLCs come first to Xbox One. Why!? Spend that money on an actual exclusive that could sell consoles.
A Little Respect
Now I respect that Microsoft has released their exclusive games on Game-pass but this is redundant if there are no exclusives worthy of our attention. Make a game like Bloodborne but for Xbox or have a story-driven adventure game or better yet if Half Life 3 ever comes out has that console exclusive! People will buy Xbox Ones in their millions to play that. Maybe not Half Life but something that already has a fan base. Nintendo did for Bayonetta and it’s one of the biggest selling IPs for their consoles.
Cater a little more to the Japanese market and Invest in new IPS and indie developers while marketing their games more effectively for these games. Now Microsoft has some great marketing tools for their games and has done effective campaigns for AAA titles for EA and Ubisoft. There are even rumors that they’ll have exclusive marketing rights for some of this year’s biggest games including Anthem, Borderlands 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and even the upcoming Splinter Cell game. This is great if not for one thing … THESE ARE NOT EXCLUSIVES! All Microsoft are doing are advertising the games and if you don’t own an Xbox One, this won’t make you get one unless these games are exclusives.
What’s Undeniable
At this current time, Microsoft is in dire need of exclusive content and not just timed exclusives or receiving DLC packs for the hottest games first as these won’t sell a console alone. Why do they waste such huge amounts of money on games that don’t need advertising when they could invest in their current IPs or develop new IPs. There’s no point for them to moan that their proposed exclusives were costing too much and then spend millions on advertising for games that will arrive on another platform and console.
Make actual console exclusives, plain and simple! Now I do respect that they’ve done a lot for the fans including its backwards compatibility program. This is picking up for Xbox 360 games but more needs to be done for the original Xbox games. It’s been 4 months and the big announcement they had on April 10th was that there be a few more games coming onto the backwards compatibility program. There’s 19 in total and some have been long overdue, yet where the hell is Doom 3, Onimusha: Genma or Timesplitters 3!? Somewhere along the line, they have to be serious and not rely on the past to keep the fans invested. It’s nice I can play my old Xbox games (we’re still waiting on more of them to come out) but I want to play new games, new exclusive titles that make me proud to own an Xbox One. Because right now, I’m playing my Playstation 4 and using the Xbox One to watch Netflix and Youtube. Yeah Phil, do something!
