The System Wars was a subject in the New York Times recently. More specifically, Microsoft's great shift away from hardware and unit sales and instead focusing on software and services. In this case, for Microsoft, the numbers don't lie...
"So she decided to study how Game Pass affected gamers’ behavior. Microsoft said on Thursday that it found that people using the service spent 50 percent more money overall on games and played 40 percent more games than nonsubscribers."
I'd urge you system warriors to read this one! It's not often we're written about in the NYT. :P
... But more seriously, articles like this make me feel like the system wars are dead. The passion for gaming is still burning bright, and we all have opinions, but who's playing this system wars game if the companies themselves are playing a completely different game. What's your barometer of success? Does it matter if companies are playing different games?
For me, I've given up on the need to own physical media... Its much more in line with my lifestyle to download everything. It also makes sense to potentially pay for a service where a library is available to game anytime.
So what say you System wars? Did you read the article? Do you like the disruptors of our hobby? Microsoft is certainly here because they disrupt the industry with ideas like Xbox live and gamepass... What does it mean to you that gaming is making a shift to a service focus... One that will, by the numbers, INCREASE your gametime... And spending!
I am fan of the service addition more than a shift. These additions simply add more options to gamers. Digital has been my preferred way of gaming for years now. I have been playing more games with GamePass. My purchasing is more of the same but with GamePass I have more opportunities to buy.
Do you have to pay to subscribe to the New York Times in order to read its articles? If so, I am not reading the article as I feel that news should be read for free and not behind a paywall. Not only that, but what the Times and other mainstream media outlets had done to journalism in America is beyond disgusting which is why I stopped watching mainstream news outlets years ago. Journalism is dead in America and buried.
And this is the reason why I stop reading New York Times, they beg for subs whenever someone visits the site and not going into political stuff here but let's just say that I HATE NYT with a passion.
I did think SW is essentially dead as it was originally conceptualized. But I do think as long as the companies have their own spin on things people will have things to argue. We've seen how "lively" PS vs Xbox debates remain in the postmortem era for both being 1) about hardware sales and 2) being independent from PC. The hard part will be to define the battlegrounds - clearly it can't be console sales. Clearly it can't be exclusives. So what counts as a "score"?
Do you have to pay to subscribe to the New York Times in order to read its articles? If so, I am not reading the article as I feel that news should be read for free and not behind a paywall. Not only that, but what the Times and other mainstream media outlets had done to journalism in America is beyond disgusting which is why I stopped watching mainstream news outlets years ago. Journalism is dead in America and buried.
there is a free subscription option.. link your google account or facebook account (or sign up using email)
I did think SW is essentially dead as it was originally conceptualized. But I do think as long as the companies have their own spin on things people will have things to argue. We've seen how "lively" PS vs Xbox debates remain in the postmortem era for both being 1) about hardware sales and 2) being independent from PC. The hard part will be to define the battlegrounds - clearly it can't be console sales. Clearly it can't be exclusives. So what counts as a "score"?
How Microsoft Is Ditching the Video Game Console Wars
Known for the Xbox, Microsoft has been diversifying away from boxy hardware in favor of reaching millions more new gamers.
Aiming to push beyond console gaming, Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, pushed for Microsoft to buy the company that makes Minecraft.Credit...Meron Tekie Menghistab for The New York Times
By Kellen Browning
June 10, 2021, 9:00 a.m. ET
In mid-2014, Satya Nadella, who had just become the chief executive of Microsoft, ushered the heads of the company’s gaming division into his fifth-floor office in Redmond, Wash.
The executives wanted Mr. Nadella to write a $2.5 billion check to buy Mojang, a Swedish company that produced a blocky, pixelated game called Minecraft. Mr. Nadella asked why Microsoft, which was being consistently outsmarted in the console business by Sony, should keep investing in video games. How, he said, did that fit with his vision for a company with a friendlier face that appealed to more consumers?
Then Phil Spencer, the new head of Xbox, told Mr. Nadella about Minecraft’s vast world where millions could socialize and where teenagers were encouraged to learn math and science skills. A deal would be the first step of a “a pretty bold vision” to transform Microsoft’s gaming business into one focused on a broader audience, rather than just console gamers, Mr. Spencer said.
Mr. Nadella agreed and made the deal happen. What followed, according to interviews with more than 20 Microsoft executives, game developers, industry analysts and gamers, was a yearslong shift. Instead of competing mainly with rival Sony to sell more consoles, Microsoft bought 15 other game studios and invested in new technologies, like a Netflix-style games subscription service and a mobile tool known as cloud gaming.
ImageA controller for the XBox Series X, the new gaming console that became available last year. Credit...Brandon Ruffin for The New York Times
Now, as Microsoft prepares to show off new offerings at the annual gaming convention E3 this weekend, its video game business looks very different. The company is still known for the Xbox, a new version of which was released in November. Even so, it has diversified beyond boxy hardware to provide a new array of services.
“Their strategy has diverged quite significantly from a traditional console approach,” said Piers Harding-Rolls, a gaming researcher at the analytics firm Ampere Analysis.
With the changes, Microsoft is betting that the future of gaming will be a post-hardware world where people may not want to spend hundreds of dollars for a console, executives and analysts said. Eventually, they said, people might no longer be tied to specific devices to play games, and will instead care more about software and services.
While Xbox consoles still generate plenty of revenue — in January, Microsoft reported $5 billion in quarterly gaming revenue for the first time, bolstered by the release of the Xbox Series X — the company stopped disclosing its console sales in 2014. The majority of gaming revenue comes from content and services, rather than Xbox hardware sales, said Tim Stuart, Xbox’s chief financial officer.
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Continue reading the main storyImageFans with the Xbox One at Best Buy Theater in Times Square in 2013. Microsoft presented the Xbox One as an entertainment device, rather than a gaming machine.Credit...Charles Sykes/Invision For Microsoft
Its gaming business still faces hurdles, including shaking a perception among gamers that it does not have their best interests at heart. That distaste stems from a messaging failure in 2013, when Microsoft presented its new Xbox One console as an entertainment device that people could use to stream music and movies. In response, gamers revolted.
The Xbox One still sold about 50 million units, analysts estimated. But it was far outdone by Sony’s PlayStation 4, which was also introduced in 2013 and has sold 116 million units.
“We lost our step of what gamers wanted,” Mr. Stuart said.
After the backlash, Microsoft shifted gears. Mr. Nadella had just taken over and wanted the company to move from focusing on software to cloud computing and subscription services.
Mr. Spencer ensured that the games division’s evolution mirrored those goals. He persuaded Mr. Nadella to buy Mojang in September 2014, which was the new chief executive’s first acquisition.
ImageSatya Nadella has pushed Microsoft into cloud computing and subscription services, and the video game business has followed suit.Credit...Kyle Johnson for The New York Times
“Gaming is much more central to Microsoft today than it ever was in our history,” Mr. Nadella said in an interview last week.
In 2017, Microsoft released Xbox Game Pass. For $10 or $15 a month, subscribers could play a specific set of games for as long as they stayed on the service. That upended the traditional model, where people paid $60 for games like Call of Duty and owned them forever.
To persuade game publishers to put their titles on Game Pass, Xbox executives flew around the world to meet developers and proselytize their vision of an industry where video games were cheap and easily accessible.
Initially, developers were “leery,” worrying they would lose money on the service, said Sarah Bond, a Microsoft vice president who leads the gaming ecosystems organization.
So she decided to study how Game Pass affected gamers’ behavior. Microsoft said on Thursday that it found that people using the service spent 50 percent more money overall on games and played 40 percent more games than nonsubscribers.
ImageMicrosoft’s Xbox executives. From left, Tim Stuart, Xbox’s chief financial officer; Mr. Spencer; Catherine Gluckstein, head of cloud gaming; Matt Booty, head of Xbox game studios; and Sarah Bond, who leads the gaming ecosystems organization.Credit...Meron Tekie Menghistab for The New York Times
Mike Blank, a senior vice president at Electronic Arts, which put its games, like the Madden NFL and FIFA soccer franchises, on Game Pass in 2020, said there was initially “trepidation” around subscription services. But the company has been happy with the results and “players are responding favorably,” he said.
Microsoft also spent heavily on game development to expand the Game Pass offerings, buying studios including a $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax Media in September and adding hundreds of games to the service. This year, it also considered buying the messaging app Discord, which gamers use to chat while playing.
The diversification continued in late 2019, when Microsoft released a cloud gaming service, in which games are hosted in a company’s data centers and are broadcast to devices. The service, Xbox Cloud Gaming, or xCloud, means that people do not need to install games or use expensive hardware.
The idea of a cloud gaming service had crystallized for Mr. Spencer earlier that year, when he was on a bus in Nairobi, Kenya, and connected to Wi-Fi. He found that he could stream a game from Microsoft’s data center in London to his phone.
“It was literally the same saved game I had sitting in Redmond, Wash.,” he said. “It really just pushes how you can make gaming truly global.”
On Thursday, Microsoft said it was working with television manufacturers to put its games inside TVs without the need for an Xbox. It added that it would soon bring cloud streaming to the console as well.
For now, cloud gaming is still bogged down by glitchy gameplay and requires a strong internet connection. Xbox Cloud Gaming is still in trial and Apple has barred the app from iPhones because it includes a catalog of games, and Apple requires separate apps for each game as part of its app review process.
At the same time, Xbox continues to trail Sony’s PlayStation. In April, Sony said it sold 7.8 million new PlayStation 5s between November and March, while analysts estimated Microsoft had sold more than four million new Xboxes in the same period. Sony declined to comment.
Some gamers said Microsoft has failed to win them over because it still lags Sony in exclusive, quality games.
“I just have always been under the impression that PlayStation is better,” said Natalia Mogollon, a gamer known as Alinity who streams her game play on the site Twitch to 1.3 million followers.
ImageAt a 2018 games conference, the crowd watched a preview of a Fallout game by Bethesda Game Studios. Bethesda was owned by ZeniMax Media, which was acquired by Microsoft. Credit...Mark Ralston/Agence-France Presse—Getty Images
Yet when Microsoft nabs exclusive content, it can backfire. In 2015, when the game publisher Square Enix released a popular game first on the Xbox, gamers were angered that Microsoft would limit access to the title. The reaction was similar when it considered buying Discord, and when it was reported last month that an upcoming ZeniMax game would be exclusive to Xbox.
“It can look like a big corporation coming in to screw up and screw over their favorite game developer,” said Rod Breslau, a video game consultant.
As Microsoft has shifted away from the console wars, Mr. Spencer’s own tone has also softened. In an interview with The New York Times in 2014, he signaled that he would not back down against Sony. “I’m in this to win,” he said.
In an interview last month, he took a different approach. “We don’t look at Nintendo and Sony and say that company has to lose in order for us to win,” he said.
Sorry for the double posting but this is what I have to say regarding "console wars" and it really stops being a console war ever since Nintendo abandon the war when the Wii launch. (Some say they left when GC came into the spotlight) Sony, MS, & Nintendo don't take this console war as seriously as fanboys have. MS is going into software business vs hardware, Nintendo always likes to do their own thing while keeping traditions alive with innovation, and Sony...Sony is Sony so let them figure out where should they go.
And this is the reason why I'm a PC gamer, I get everything and I want everything.
Just read the article. I am not sure it added anything new to the overall dynamics. It is clear that MS scope is beyond consoles and that rather forward thinking. The moment MS took the leap with Xbox Play Anywhere, I was sold on their direction for gaming. That should have been their approach from the very start but they delve into to asinine culture of console wars and stayed their until ~2016. I am fan of this new approach and I hope that the traditional practice of locking game to specific hardware disappears.
MS should have a sub service like gamepass but also jump in on game rentals for newer games. They should also have the same games available on both xbox gamepass and PC gamepass, aside from the games that can't be played on xbox for some reason.
sounds like exactly what I've been saying for quite some time.. Nintendo left the "console wars" in 2006 with the Wii and Microsoft left in 2016 with Xbox Play Anywhere..
and with Sony slowly but surely following Microsoft onto PC and partnering with Microsoft for cloud/streaming, the only people still arguing about consoles are the fanboys (and "concerned fans") that are either too ignorant or too stubborn to see the writing on the wall..
as for me personally, i'm all for it.. Xbox is providing tons of games in one subscription service across multiple devices, Nintendo has both created and perfected the hybrid handheld/console, Sony is the DeFacto leader in traditional console gaming, and PC is the hub for nearly everything..
there's something for everyone.. RIP System Wars, all hail gaming..
At this point Sony fanboys are that soldier stranded at a Pacific island thinking WW2 is still going on while everybody else moved from it and are just having fun and enjoying life.
Mehh SW has been dead for a long time imo... pc being so fare ahead of console that it isn’t even a competition anymore, Nintendo doing their own thing ( and being extremely successful) and yeah MS turning their focus more and more towards a gamepass brand instead of the Xbox brand. It’s basically only Sony who still fits the criteria for systemwar and even they are moving away from exclusive as there is just to much money in the pc market!
@TheEroica: Here’s my response to the subs spend more money than non subs bullet point.
What percentage of the subs are the hardcore that buy all the 1st party games no matter what? How much money did the subs spend annually on software before Game Pass? That’s my biggest gripe with Game Pass at the moment. Xbox gave their most enthusiastic supporters a reason to spend less money. Far less money.
And how disruptive have they been really? PlayStation and Nintendo are more popular, selling more hardware and more software than ever before. They are the top 2 in services and subscription revenue as well. Not Xbox. So what exactly is Xbox disrupting other than their bottom line?
And let’s be real. The console war isn’t dead. And Nintendo didn’t “ditch the console war” like others have stated in this thread. The moves Xbox has made have been to improve their standing. Nintendo made the Switch to merge their products to improve their standing. The war hasn’t ended. The way the big three are fighting it has evolved.
I am a fan of having options. All 3 main companies are using different strategies and all of them seem to work. It's healthy for the industry and awesome for us, gamers.
Just not so awesome for fanboys and their little wars, though 😄
They are NOT ditching the console wars. They are far too obsessed with trying to push Sony out of the market to do that. Just because they're expanding the digital platforms of their games doesn't mean they've bailed on selling boxes. It's the main part of MS's ecosystem for Xbox and they need them out there to get people to invest in gaming under their umbrella.
They are NOT ditching the console wars. They are far too obsessed with trying to push Sony out of the market to do that. Just because they're expanding the digital platforms of their games doesn't mean they've bailed on selling boxes. It's the main part of MS's ecosystem for Xbox and they need them out there to get people to invest in gaming under their umbrella.
No, YOU have problems. Mr. "I'm getting a discount on Ratchet and Clank because I teach Insomniac devs". 🤣🤣🤣 What I'm saying is common sense. They even admitted Sony is their main competitor again in the Epic case, after blowing us some bullshit that it was Google and Apple.
No, YOU have problems. Mr. "I'm getting a discount on Ratchet and Clank because I teach Insomniac devs". 🤣🤣🤣 What I'm saying is common sense. They even admitted Sony is their main competitor again in the Epic case, after blowing us some bullshit that it was Google and Apple.
Are you willing to bet your account on my claims? 😊
No, YOU have problems. Mr. "I'm getting a discount on Ratchet and Clank because I teach Insomniac devs". 🤣🤣🤣 What I'm saying is common sense. They even admitted Sony is their main competitor again in the Epic case, after blowing us some bullshit that it was Google and Apple.
Are you willing to bet your account on my claims? 😊
That whole thing sounds odd. You know someone on a dev team that’s getting you a discount? That sounds more like you know somebody that works at Best Buy. If you know somebody in the industry, only getting a discount is a slap in the face...
@goldenelementxl: not really - one of my friends worked for EA and she only got an employee discount on the games, which she shared with us. They don't get the games free (although I'm sure it varies by company)
That whole thing sounds odd. You know someone on a dev team that’s getting you a discount? That sounds more like you know somebody that works at Best Buy. If you know somebody in the industry, only getting a discount is a slap in the face...
What is so hard to believe that a person that teaches Game development for a living has a students that work in the industry? If you work at any large corporation, things aren't giving out for free, you get a discount.
@Sagemode87: MS tried and has almost 8 times more subscribers.
8 times more subs but half the subscription and services revenue. Someday we will have an honest discussion about those sub numbers.
You can continue to ignore the success that GamePass has had and you can spend time evaluating their cost to run their operation. That is and will continue not a concern of mine.
What is so hard to believe that a person that teaches Game development for a living has a students that work in the industry? If you work at any large corporation, things aren't giving out for free, you get a discount.
@BenjaminBanklin said:
Who's the dev? We'll ask if they know you
You don't know anyone in the industry. 😂🤣
Neither do you with your lying ass. The lies are so numerous they're spiraling out of control. 🤣🤣🤣 What the hell does a message board-dwelling Xbot have to teach anyone in this industry? And why can't you afford a game at full price?
Neither do you with your lying ass. The lies are so numerous they're spiraling out of control. 🤣🤣🤣 What the hell does a message board-dwelling Xbot have to teach anyone in this industry? And why can't you afford a game at full price?
Remember the last time you challenge me on a claim you made an ass of yourself. 😂 Seems like you are interested in a repeat. 🤣
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