In the bygone days of gaming (think the era of Nintendo versus Sega battles), video game exclusivity was viewed as a divisive strategy for selling consoles. Fast forward to today, and it’s as though we’ve slipped into an alternate reality. From all appearances, the state of gaming has changed, with Phil Spencer, the Xbox chief, leading the charge into unfamiliar territory.
During a chat with Polygon, Spencer shared insights into Xbox’s strategic “brand pivot,” a move aimed squarely at bringing down the old walls of exclusivity in an attempt to, hopefully, attract broader and newer demographics to the Xbox ecosystem.
“This notion that Xbox can only be this one device that plugs into a television isn’t something we see in the Gen Z research. Because nothing else is like that for them. Some of them will have an iPhone, some will have an Android, but all the games and everything is the same,” Spencer stated.
Clearly, the concept of exclusivity is becoming archaic for today’s gamers, who have repeatedly expressed their loathing for any publisher that limits access. That said, the road ahead for Xbox may not be as easy as Spencer suggests. The so-called “pivot” to lure in the legions of younger gamers might work against Xbox and end up nudging its target audience towards rival consoles.
Nintendo is unlikely to give up exclusivity, a strategy that has served it well for decades. PlayStation, on the other hand, continues to tiptoe into the multi-platform tussle, albeit with a cautious stride. Xbox falls somewhere in the middle of all this, though to be honest, Starfield proved that exclusivity might not be the best approach for Microsoft Gaming.
The discourse around exclusivity is not merely academic. In another segment of the gaming world, Spencer lamented the snail-paced decline of Moore’s Law (the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years) and the resultant economic predicament of subsidizing hardware.
Given the slowing cadence at which console components reduce in cost, doubts have cropped up over the sustainability of traditional business models. As he put it, “Subsidizing hardware becomes more challenging in today’s world.”
Again, this might be another case of Spencer not seeing the forest for the trees. If you take a look at the list of the top 10 best-selling game consoles of all time, you’ll notice that half of them belong to Nintendo. This is no coincidence.
After years of trial and error, the Japanese console maker realized that it doesn’t have to compete with its rivals on hardware (which is why the Switch still sells to this day). Trying to be at the top when it comes to cutting-edge hardware is a zero-sum game. Sure, we as players benefit from this, but in the end, the console maker is unable to offset the R&D and manufacturing costs.
Ultimately, we as gamers will just sit back and watch this saga of exclusivity and console wars unfold. Whether this leads to a new golden age of gaming or a confusing mishmash of cross-platform mediocrity, well, that’s a story still waiting to be written.
