![]() ![]() A gaming subscription that extends beyond the console ecosystem to reach players on PCs and phones has been at the heart of the Xbox strategy for years now. Xbox is now a service business - specifically, a Game Pass business. In the current economy, and the risk-averse atmosphere in entertainment generally, that means making sure bets - whether they are mass-market action games with high production values that can ask for a $70 sticker price at scale, or service games aimed squarely at engaging PlayStation’s core audience (and monetized to suit). It needs each of its games to make money. PlayStation is a product business, and it’s the biggest revenue generator for its parent company, Sony. Is the money really to be found in such different places for the two of them? ![]() ![]() What happened? It’s unlikely to be just a matter of taste these are businesses, and they go where the money is. A couple of console generations ago, Sony’s first-party studios were the creative risk-takers with a diverse output, while Microsoft single-mindedly chased the Halo audience. But if Sony’s first-party efforts fall broadly into two buckets - games that look like Naughty Dog made them, and games that look like Bungie made them - Microsoft’s are clearly much harder to categorize. This shouldn’t be taken to mean that Microsoft doesn’t want to make multiplayer shooters - although it will probably take some time to lick its wounds over its dreadfully mismanaged failure to turn Halo into a hit service game with Halo Infinite, not to mention the botched launch of Arkane’s Redfall. Microsoft also offered updates on Fable, Avowed, Hellblade 2, and Starfield - all single-player games, mostly substantial RPGs, but stylistically very different from each other. Clockwork Revolution, a time-travel steampunk role-playing game.A Monkey Island-themed expansion for pirate service game Sea of Thieves.Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, an extension of the celebrated sim with more game-like elements (plus a Dune-themed expansion for the original).South of Midnight, an occult narrative game set in the American South.But there’s a clear trend nevertheless.īy contrast, these were the new first-party games revealed at the Xbox showcase: This is not to say that Sony is turning its back on its stock-in-trade of polished, cinematic, single-player action games: Spider-Man 2’s impressive demo gives the lie to that, and this is the company that owns Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, and Santa Monica Studio. Fairgame$ leans more toward Overwatch, but you get the idea.) (Even more specifically: sci-fi shooters that remind you of Destiny. Sony seems keen to exploit Bungie’s heritage by leaning hard on genres and stylings that have been proven to draw a service game audience on PlayStation - specifically sci-fi shooters. There’s a striking tonal and genre similarity between these projects, too. Little is known about these games, but Marathon has explicitly been set up to be a long-term “living” game, and it doesn’t seem like a stretch to put Fairgame$ and Concord in the same bucket. Concord, a PvP multiplayer shooter from recent acquisition Firewalk Studios, which was founded by Bungie and Destiny veterans.Marathon, Bungie’s sci-fi extraction shooter.Fairgame$, a punky extraction shooter from recent acquisition Haven Studios.Lo and behold, in terms of new reveals from first-party PlayStation studios, the showcase gave us: The PlayStation owner has been vocal about its desire to get into the business of live-service games in a big way, and how this motivated its acquisition of Destiny maker Bungie. ![]() It’s more interesting to look at the substance of the games shown, and what those can tell us about the two platform holders’ priorities. Like its rival has this summer, Sony will probably be able to bounce back in a year’s time. But there’s only so much you can read into this - the most plausible conclusion is simply that post-pandemic production issues are hitting Sony’s family of studios a year or so later than they hit Microsoft’s and Ubisoft’s, leaving it with a gap between this year’s Spider-Man 2 and far-off prospects like Bungie’s Marathon. Most observers feel that Xbox had the better show, in terms of the number and range of titles shown and the promise of its future slate. Now that the dust has settled on Xbox’s and PlayStation’s big summer showcases, it’s a good time to compare them and look for evidence of where each company is heading - or thinks it’s heading.Īs has increasingly been the case over the last few years, the two presentations were very different. ![]()
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