While the PS4 and PS5 have both been incredibly successful consoles for Sony, a general sentiment has been that Microsoft has been falling behind in the “console war” since the release of the Xbox One. Industry analysts, however, believe otherwise.
Mat Piscatella, an analyst with Circana, spoke about the state of Xbox in an interview with GamesRadar, especially in comparison with PlayStation, in terms of sales.
Interestingly, Piscatella points out that Microsoft’s gaming division has been doing quite well, even if one were to look at the sales charts of Sony’s consoles, since quite a few Xbox games are also available on the PS5.
“If you look at what’s going on now in the sales, you look at like the PlayStation sales chart, you see a lot of Microsoft on there,” said Piscatella. “And the more that they can broaden the appeal of their products, their IP across other platform holders, why not do that?””
Piscatella states that, rather than looking at purely console sales, Xbox should instead focus on bringing more of its titles to other platforms.
“You look towards the future and some of the things they’ve talked about, expanding the reach of the Xbox brand well beyond the Xbox console is a key initiative and they’re executing on that,” said Piscatella, talking about Xbox’s current strategy.
“You look at their results in their earnings reports, and you go, okay, that looks pretty darn good, even though they recognize that console sales themselves are lagging for them. You look at it that way and the future is actually looking pretty bright, although, yeah, it’s been a rocky couple of years for sure.”
The fact that Xbox also places quite a bit of emphasis on its Game Pass subscription service means that the company is treating Xbox as more of an ecosystem than just console hardware, according to Piscatella.
“I think it has a really nice role to fill in a portfolio of products being offered to consumers,” he said. “But perhaps the previous strategy of going all in on just that, course correcting from that seems to have been a good decision.”
Xbox kicked off its greater trend of bringing games to more platforms last year, by releasing titles like Sea of Thieves and Hi-Fi Rush on to the PS5. The company seems intent on bringing more of its major releases to PlayStation as well alongside Xbox Series X/S and PC, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle set to arrive this Spring for PS5.
Curiously, the last time we saw a console maker leave its own hardware platform behind in favour of acting as a third-party developer and publisher was Sega after the ill-fated launch of the Dreamcast. Since then, however, Sega has made a name for itself as a publisher in a number of genres across all platforms. It published hits like Sonic X Shadow Generations, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Persona 3 Reload in 2024 alone.
