Third-Party Game Developers Are Reportedly Questioning Potential Xbox Releases

Xbox might be facing some push back from third-party developers. According to Chris Dring of GamesIndustry.biz, developers he spoke to during the recent Game Developers Conference indicated that Xbox’s general place in the market right now spells trouble for Microsoft.

Going by the market, it appears that sales of Xbox consoles, especially in markets outside of North America, seem to be falling. This has led many third-party developers to start questioning whether it’s even worth the extra time that is often needed to port their games for Xbox Series X/S.

“Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer,” said Dring during a recent episode of the GamesIndustry.biz podcast, which you can check out below. “The other thing I heard—I heard it from a very prominent company and one not so prominent—was Xbox’s performance in Europe is just flatlining.”

“The phrase one major company who released a big game last year said [was], ‘I don’t know why we bothered supporting it’,” said Dring.

Some of this questioning also seems to rise from Microsoft’s mandate that games released on Xbox Series X and Series S need to have feature parity. This includes features that would be much harder to bring over, such as Baldur’s Gate 3‘s problems with split-screen co-op for the platform in late 2023.

“We mentioned on a previous podcast that we’d heard retailers in Europe are considering or had already been cutting back their Xbox stock on their shelves—hardware, games, that kind of thing—and now you’ve got third-party publishers going, ‘we’re putting in a lot of effort trying to create a Series S version and an X version of a game when, to be honest with you, for us the market is PC and PS5’,” said Dring.

While exact numbers are difficult to come by, it is worth noting that Microsoft is currently in third place when looking at the current console market. Back in June 2023, Microsoft even said to the US Federal Trade Commission that it “lost the console wars”.