Let’s imagine the following situation: we sit on the couch, turn on the TV and start our console. We are going to look for and Buy a new game, we have collected our payroll today and we are going to throw it away. Where we go? Surely to the Microsoft Store or the PlayStation Store, because we have no other choice. Both the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 only support their own stores. But what if there was a choice? What if the Xbox user could buy their games from, say, Epic Games?
For Phil Spencer, that has a future. And also, a lot of sense.
The power to choose. Speaking to Polygon, Phil Spencer expressed his frustration with closed ecosystems a few days ago and confirmed that being able to choose “the type of experience you have (choosing where to buy games)” on PC “has real value.” Things, of course, have changed a lot over the years and now we look at this strategy with different eyes.
Losses and gardens. Consoles have historically been walled gardens of affordable access and expensive extras. The player pays a low Price for the hardware (usually at a loss or with hardly any margins) and pays a higher price for the software (the games), which is where the profit really lies.
The console at an affordable price is the garden, the video game is the bottle of water that costs 80 euros and the wall is that if you want water, you can only buy it at the only stall in the garden, which also belongs to the owner of the garden. . This, when all consoles had a disc reader, was less evident, but the arrival and penetration of digital-only consoles have made it more evident.
Selling cheap hardware doesn’t pay off. According to Phil Spencer, this made sense a few years ago, since the loss in hardware was recovered with software, but according to the head of Xbox, “Moore’s Law has slowed down. The price of the components of a console does not It’s going down as fast as in previous generations.” To this we must add the rise of PC gaming, the stagnation of the console fleet and the arrival of Steam Deck type consoles/computers. There are too many options, many more than before, and the question is whether keeping players within the walled garden makes sense.
Open doors. Spencer is not clear that this strategy is growing the industry. In fact, the trend is quite the opposite. Why is PC gaming attractive? Because it gives options. While it is true that Steam has a clearly dominant position in the world of video games, nothing (except an exclusivity contract) prevents a game from being on the Microsoft Store, Epic Games, Steam, GOG or any other platform. This improves competition and, above all, gives options to the player, who is not tied to a specific store.
Microsoft has admitted on occasion that it has never made money selling Xbox consoles
For Xbox it makes sense. Opening Xbox and allowing other video game stores could be an important incentive for players, who would see this possibility as a good argument to opt for the Microsoft console. And not necessarily because of the exclusive Microsoft games, but because of the possibility of buying them at lower prices in other stores, taking advantage of third-party promotions, etc.
The key, in any case, is not so much that the user opts for one hardware or another, the key is that the games are available and in that sense, the hardware is only an access platform. It’s no longer a question of what exclusive games I can play on my home video game player, but rather what options I have when it comes to getting them and how versatile the platform is. Approaching the PC is, in that sense, an interesting strategy.
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