But since closing the Activision deal last fall, Xbox has made a series of moves that have left fans and analysts baffled about its overall strategy. It has laid off thousands of staff, shuttered studios and been unable to articulate a consistent message about how it plans to release games. Xbox fans assumed those big acquisitions would lead to more exclusive games that helped justify their console purchase, but the opposite has happened.
Early this year, Microsoft began putting some of its former exclusives on PlayStation, starting with smaller, older titles such as Hi-Fi Rush. This week, the company announced that another big, new title will follow the same route. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, coming in December to Xbox and PC, will arrive on PlayStation in the spring of 2025.
Ditching console exclusives is good news for players who can only afford to stick to one piece of hardware. And Microsoft was able to squeeze the Activision deal past regulatory scrutiny in part because it promised to continue releasing Call of Duty on PlayStation. But Xbox’s release strategy has been so confusing, it requires a massive spreadsheet and a full-time job to keep track of it all.
basically specifically for AAA titles, development cost for them are soo astronomically high that the console platform isnt enough to support them alone (imo) both Sony and Microsoft basically have to decide to either scale back complexity of games (like what Nintendo would do) or release it to more platforms because 1 device platform is no longer enough for some titles.
Sony decides to port to PC, (and so does 3rd party companies like Square Enix and capcom who realize the need), while Microsoft is taking the subscription route which bolters both their cloud infrastructure numbers, and provides a subscriber count which investors like because subscriptions are content quarterly flow of money rather than peaks and drops based on game release.
Nintendo is already telling their investors to expect development costs to go up substantially. Part of the reason why their games were so much cheaper for so long is because there’s not enough horsepower on their console to bother with the extra fidelity that requires more labor to make.