The console war between PlayStation and Xbox is as old as time, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. While it has been a financially rocky period for both PlayStation and Xbox, Xbox certainly suffered more than its competitor. However, an analyst in the gaming industry has shared that they think that Xbox is actually doing pretty well for themselves and has a bright future ahead of them.
Mat Piscatella, Executive Director of games at Circana, spoke to GamesRadar+ about Xbox’s history and what is in store for them in the future. According to Piscatella, if you look at the overall sales and what is going on in the PlayStation sales chart, you may find that there is a fair amount of Microsoft on their charts. He says that for Xbox to be successful, they need to branch out to embrace other platforms instead of competing against them, which will boost their sales considerably.
“You can look towards the future and some of the things they’ve talked about; expanding the reach of the Xbox brand well beyond the Xbox console is a key initiative, and they’re executing on that.”
2024 was their most obvious attempt to date regarding moving away from their console and branching out and funneling money into other money makers. For example, Xbox started to promote Game Pass pretty heavily. While for a lot of companies, subscriptions don’t particularly do well, Game Pass has a lot of potential as it allows those on PC and Xbox to access games for a fixed price, giving them access to triple-A titles and indie games.
While Game Pass is important to Xbox, Piscatella believes that they need to balance out their approach to Game Pass and their other services, rather than honing in on it so heavily.
“I think it has a really nice role to fill in a portfolio of products being offered to consumers. But perhaps the previous strategy of going all in on just that, course correcting them seems to have been a good decision.”
Their competitor, PlayStation, made obvious efforts last year to work on putting some of their games on other platforms, instead of keeping them as a console exclusive. So far, this has worked tremendously in their favor. Games such as Helldivers 2 have been massively successful across both PC and PlayStation 5. When it comes to exclusives, Xbox doesn’t really have that many on offer that players are desperate for, and as a result, they are trying to be more aggressive in getting Xbox titles shipped to other platforms to ensure the most profits.
