Home » Technology » Portal Lead Designer Joins Xbox Game Studios – Gaming – News

Portal Lead Designer Joins Xbox Game Studios – Gaming – News

I’m sure to get a lot of comments with this comment, but let me try. I try to describe it as best I can, but much of this is also an assumption. Read this with an economic/business lens. Not with gaming glasses.

1. There are only 3 (relevant) console systems from three organizations. That users choose a “camp” is an age-old behavior, but you wonder whether that is relevant for a commercial product at all. You see that just as much in football and it’s just as useless. Because players cross clubs and only have loyalty for the duration of their salary. When a national team is playing, suddenly the city border is not important, but the national border. If there was a continent competition, we would suddenly be in favor of Europe. That camp pick behavior is understandable (you have to justify your purchase), but it’s basically useless.

2. Microsoft is a software maker and has never seen proprietary hardware as a primary product like Apple/Sony does. Microsoft benefits from having software with as many users as possible. Wherever they are. Those are the steps they are now taking with Microsoft 365. For the gaming division, the physical xbox device was an exception because it wouldn’t make sense for games development if multiple variations were running on different hardware.

3. Recently, Satya Nadella indicated that Microsoft wants a “leading roll in democratizing gaming” [bron]. These are deliberately chosen words and are different from a leading role in game sales. It means “probably” that Microsoft wants to fully focus on “Gaming as a Service” and therefore also wants to become hardware independent. Ideally for Microsoft, you can install Gamepass on your Playstation and your Switch. Hardware is not their thing. I’m already looking forward to a first batch that will receive an Xboydevice is going to release with only Gamepass.

4. Nintendo and Playstation have different interests. This may/will partly be because they are now old organizations and rely on an old economy. Microsoft was, but has been changing its organization, its products and its culture over the past 7~10 years. You see that “democratizing” in all their products and it does them no harm. At the time of Windows Phone, their iOS products were already better than on their own platform. The hope is that Nintendo/Sony will also continue such an organizational change.

5. Then you can say: “let them release all those games on PS or Switch too?”. But Microsoft has already tried that, and failed with the announcement of the Xbox One. I suspect that really should have been “the one” where Gaming as a Service should have been introduced and you didn’t actually need new (MS) hardware. There, however, they failed and probably underestimated the power of PS/Nintendo. In the meantime they have also brought games such as Ori to the Switch and they were the first to make multiplayer platform independent. But to democratize the entire market and make it platform independent, it seems that the entire market must first be turned upside down. Bethesda is totally on board with this and that’s why some games are going to be exclusives, but many aren’t likely.

Xbox and Bethesda have long shared a common vision for the future of gaming. Both as fans and as creators, Bethesda understands the potential of Xbox Game Pass. Source

Your conclusion that MS has been eating out of their noses for 20 years is therefore not correct. The first two consoles were mainly to penetrate the market. And at the time that would have been mainly to make Xbox and PC more of an all-round system. The vision has changed considerably in the last 10 years. The Xbox One was way too early for that. And now they’re continuing with the Series X.

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