Microsoft’s Xbox-PC strategy makes perfect sense
Microsoft wants to win back the PC market, again. We’ve heard the empty promises before, but this time it seems like they’re making a serious go at it. We now have Game Pass, xCloud, and a promise to bring every single Xbox exclusive to the platform. Which has a lot of Xbox fans asking, why? Why would Microsoft cannibalize their gaming platform like that?
A lot of console fanboys seem to treat losing exclusives to PC as some sort of existential crisis. As if this somehow undermines the value of the platform. Which may be the case with Sony and Nintendo. However, Microsoft is in a bit of a unique situation where they control two previously separate gaming platforms instead of just the one.
The thing is, PC doesn’t really compete with consoles. Sure, there’s some overlap. A lot of PC gamers do own a console, usually a PlayStation or Switch, for the exclusives. For the most part though, the card carrying members of PCMR don’t really like being confined to plug-and-play boxes with limited feature sets. They’re the hot rodders of the gaming community. They want to be able to open things up and tinker. Or more accurately, plaster everything with RGB. So they’re less likely to buy consoles to begin with.
That leaves a large, untapped market on the table that every other console maker is ignoring. Microsoft, however, owns Windows; the platform of choice for most PC games. They control the APIs that most of those games run on. All of which are shared with the Xbox. Making it darn simple to port those over from their console. So, why wouldn’t they?
You see, console manufacturers don’t actually make a lot of money off hardware. Losing an Xbox sale to PC isn’t really much skin off their nose. They’re still making money selling Windows licenses, not to mention all that data Windows 10 is slurping up. (Unless you know how to turn that off, which most people don’t.) So they’re still making a tidy bit of revenue off PC sales.
Where they’re losing out is on software sales. This is the biggest money maker for console manufacturers. However, due to the openness of the Windows platform, and their decision to ignore PC gaming for so long, rival companies like Valve and GOG swooped in and stole their lunch. So now they have to get back the piece of that pie. Problem is they can’t just close off the ecosystem like Apple did. That would piss a lot of people off. People who would jump ship to Linux or a rival console. So instead they’re focusing on making Xbox a service rather than a physical product lineup.
Game Pass for PC currently features a rotating all-you-can-eat buffet of 100+ of games for just $11.99 CAD a month. This includes Xbox exclusives as soon as they come out. The company will also be rolling out their Ultimate tier this holiday, which will add xCloud streaming and EA Play at no extra cost. Or so they claim. Meanwhile, the Ultimate Console tier at $16.99 gives you access to all the same features on both console and PC, and includes Xbox Live Gold.
This really blurs the lines between the two platforms. And, if the same service works with both, then it makes PC gamers more likely to pick up something like an inexpensive Series S to serve as a secondary system. Since you could basically close out of a game on PC, and fire it up from your last save in the living room, with no interruptions nor having to buy the same game twice.
As we know, big business really likes the subscription model versus one time purchases, as continuous revenue streams look better on an income statement. And to be frank, Game Pass packs a lot of value into the price of a Netflix subscription, and has 100% fewer 11-year-olds twerking.
It almost sounds like I’m making a sales pitch for the service, but that really sums up just how brilliant this strategy is. Assuming of course they continue to follow through with it, and take it seriously.
There are certainly issues with their Xbox for PC platform. Microsoft is still insisting on using Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, which still don’t work nearly as well as they should. I’d much rather see them return to the older Win32/64 (.exe) API to make these games easier to mod. The UI for the store also needs a lot of work. Sometimes you’ll click a game and it’ll still ask for a purchase even though it’s supposed to be included with Game Pass. But overall, they have good groundwork here that’s intriguing a lot of PC gamers.
Microsoft has come into this generation swinging, and has a lot of stuff to like here. This is a win-win for both PC and console players, and is shaping up to be Sony’s game to lose unless they can come up with something better.
