A lot of people think that Microsoft/Xbox is making a huge mistake with the, “this is an Xbox” ad promotion. Gamers seem to be having a hard time coping with where Xbox is headed. I’m not certain, but I think that Phil Spencer over at Xbox has a couple of tricks up his sleeves. Microsoft is poised to change gaming forever. Good or bad is yet to be seen.

I can understand the need to make more revenue from their gaming division. Instead of having tent pole AAA 1^st party titles to get players into your ecosystem, they want their games on PlayStation, Switch 2, PC and mobile. If it has a screen, Xbox wants to be on it. It’s not a bad thing to want more customers, but Spencer is going to change console gaming forever and I’m not sure that it’s worth it.

Spencer has said that there will be more Xbox hardware in the future. That was my biggest worry. That they would stop making consoles and go 3^rd party like SEGA did back in the day. To this very day I believe that the Dreamcast was better than the PS2. Instead, what I think they’ll do is what 3DO did back in the day. Lease out the name and basic hardware for several companies to make. Panasonic produced the first models in 1993 with further renditions released afterwards by manufacturers GoldStar, Sanyo, Creative Labs, and Samsung Electronics. I could see MS doing this. However, what I also think is that they want to do the same thing on the software side.

Instead of having multiple companies making an Xbox console, MS wants the Xbox app on everything. Everything is going digital only, I’m thinking next generation, so to have your app on everything could be huge. Their whole goal is to make as much money as possible off of their software. MS is a software company after all. Having Halo on PS6 may upset Xbox fans but the money to be made would be too tempting to ignore.

When I first thought about it, I wasn’t onboard right away. I remember when Mario and Sonic were going at it. SEGA and Nintendo were really going at it. The Genesis and SNES were going toe to toe, quality release one after another. Gamers like me had them all because each console had games that you could only get there, on their console. And that’s how SONY and Nintendo got so far ahead. Exclusive games. The problem is that, they don’t sell well enough to validate the high cost for a triple A game.

If I’m right in my assumption that that’s the way MS is going then expect to see SONY do similar or if not, the same thing that MS is doing. Time will tell, but the future of gaming is looking very interesting.