It’s hard to think about Xbox leaving the console business behind as anything other than the end of the world. Ever since the brand was brought into existence over two decades ago, it has traded on the same business philosophy as Sony and Nintendo. Here is a console. It has games that you canno🌄t play anywhere else. Please can you buy it? But for a long time, thi🍸s strategy hasn’t worked for Xbox, and I’m tempted to suggest it never will again.

For a while it did, with the Xbox 360 generation especially being home to legends like Halo, Gears of War, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Viva Pinata, Forza, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Blue Dragon, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lost Odyssey, and superior ports of every third-party title - courtesy of the console being much easier to develop for than the competition, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a far cry from today. It emboldened Xbox to try new things and expand its exclusive portfolio, but this also developed🔯 into a hubris which would see it crash and burn in the generations to come.

Xbox Could Follow In The Footsteps Of The Sega Dreamcast

Xbox One would see the introduction of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game Pass and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Play Anywhere, two services that brought excꦅlusive games to PC for the first time and ensured a future where each platform was treated as equal.

But having all of your blockbusters available on a service that costs a fraction of the price was inevitably going to bleed into sales and profits, something we are now seeing the consequences of in high-profile ports and a console strategy that simply isn’t working. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did see another piece of Xbox hardware, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:perhaps even a handheld that better considers its place in the curre🥀nt landscape. But after that? Who know✱s.

When the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sega Dreamcast first launched, it felt like the future. Arriving ahead of the PS2 was a console with realistic graphics, online capabilities, and some fantastic games you could not find anywhere else. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Soul Calibur and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sonic Adventure were serious business, and there we൩re more exclusive gems on the way for early adopters.

But after being burned by Saturn, which was leagues behind the PlayStation in terms of 3D capabilitie💎s and exclusive titles, the large majority of people instead waited for Sony’s console. As did developers, who instead of third party ports of major titles forwent the Dreamcast and opted for what would soon become the big three - PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo.

In just three years, the console was taken off the market and Sega was forced into becoming a third-party developer and publisher like Capcom, Square Enix, and m𝓰any others.

It felt like a death knell at the time, but fast-forward two decades or so and I would argue Sega is more successful now than it was back then. Sonic games are selling millions and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网💜:launched a billion dollar movie franchise, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Like A Dragon/Yakuza has gone from a cult classic to a global phenomenon, even gett😼ing its own Amazon Prime series, while there ♕is more reverence for its classic library than ever.

Sega has good things to look forward to regardless of the platform its games release on, and the mo💫re I look at the modern state of Xbox, the more I’m convinced it will follow in its footsteps. I think the transition has already begun, and once you open a box like this, there ain’t no closing it.

The Transition Away From Console Hardware Has Already Begun

Over the past year, we have seen 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sea of Thieves, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pentiment, Grounded, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hi-Fi Rush come to PS5 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nintendo Switch, with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Indiana Jones and The Great Circle set to arrive later this year. All three games are published and developed by Xbox Game Studios, while upcoming titles like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Doom: The Dark Ages aꦦnd The Outer Worlds 2 are also confirmed to be multiplatf🌳orm.

Combine this with a fresh helping of rumours claiming that Halo will eventually make it🔥s way to fellow consoles it becomes clear that at some point over the past 18 months a major shift in strategy has gone down in the Xbox camp. No longer is𝐆 the focus on acquiring studios or developing exclusive games, but ensuring these experiences are reaching the widest audiences and stand to gain the bigges💖t profits possible. If that means putting aside an imaginary console war, so be it.

Once you have committed to multiplatform releases for games of this s𝓡ize, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Xbox will then be a brand associated with all major consoles. Once the deed is done with Halo, it would be wise to throw flagship hardware aside f💟or good as it focuses on subscription services, dedicated handhelds, and an interest in making games in which there is no permanent residence.

This week’s Developer Direct was the perfect means of showing what that future might look like, since there wasn’t a big deal made of how games are taking advanta🥂ge of X🤪box hardware or where exactly you can play them.

Those were just footnotes as the pre⛎sentation let developers and games speak for themselves, and I would rather Xbox be in that business than continually shooting itself in the foot. It worked out for Sega, and the more I see from Xbox in the current cl꧒imate, the more I think it could work for it, too.