P.S. Xbox suicided itself with bad games and GamePass, not PC releases.
No, you have to stop this. PC Day 1 was
ABSOLUTELY a factor in diminishing Xbox console's value proposition to many gamers, denying that is lunacy. It was not the
ONLY factor, but it was a key one.
When Phil Spencer went on X-Cast last year and complained about Xbox struggling to find an identity, what do you think he really wanted to say out loud? Yeah he tried blaming Sony & Nintendo having exclusives as part of that, but it doesn't take a quantum physicist to realize that an Xbox having no exclusives was his roundabout point. And what is something MS themselves have done to diminish exclusives for Xbox? Doing Day 1 on PC for all of their games.
The lack of any genuine 1P exclusives for Xbox is at least 25% part of the problems with the console's market performance today. In fact you can run down the list of factors:
1: Day 1 PC for all 1P games/PC port windows too short (25%)
2: Lack of big mainstream quality 1P & 3P exclusives for several years (25%)
3: Lack of global regional focuses (15%)
4: Lack of long-term 3P partnerships (10%)
5: Bad traditional marketing & messaging (15%)
6: Underperforming specs (10%)
Now let's say all of these problems existing at once could sink lifetime sales by 50% or more gen-over-gen.
I'm actually going to test this with previous consoles from other companies:
SEGA
MegaDrive (28 million LTD) to Saturn (~ 10 million LTD). 65% drop gen-over-gen. Which of the 6 factors above did Saturn suffer from?
Answer: #s 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 (75%). Reduces some b/c of great Japanese region focus (-5%) and having a few (very few) big mainstream 1P releases in select regions like VF in Japan (-5%). So from 75% to 65%.
NINTENDO
SNES (49 million LTD) to N64 (35 million LTD). ~ 25% drop gen-over-gen. Which of the 6 factors above did N64 suffer from?
Answer: #s 3, 4 and 6 (35%). Reduces some b/c N64 had really strong regional focus in the U.S (-5%), and some strong traditional marketing & messaging in US & parts of Europe (-5%). So from 35% to 25%
N64 (35 million LTD) to Gamecube (21 million). 40% drop gen-over-gen. Which of the 6 factors did Gamecube suffer from?
Answer: #s 3, 4 and 5 (40%)
Wii (100 million LTD) to Wii U (15 million). 85% drop gen-over-gen. Which of the 6 factors did Wii U suffer from?
Answer: #s 3, 4, 5 and 6 (50%). Obviously this one's a bit of an outlier, since PC isn't a factor here at all, and it did have some big-selling 1P games like Smash Bros., Mario Kart & 3D World.
However, none of those games did anything to move hardware, so #2 can be applied as (+10%); Wii U's specs weren't just underperforming, they were a whole generation behind and it didn't work this time like with the Wii, so $ 6 can be applied with an additional (+10%). 3P basically abandoned Nintendo with Wii U so that's another (+5%), and the messaging was just terrible, so that could be another (+10%).
Brings it up from 50% to 85%
MICROSOFT
Microsoft is harder to apply this to because they have two back-to-back generations that are largely similar in terms of mistakes, and I'm sure to a lot of casuals are seen as part of the same generation due to naming and marketing conventions. So I'll be treating XBO and XBS as a "rolling generation", but not wherein XBO & XBS numbers are cumulative.
Instead I'll compare them both to the Xbox 360.
Xbox 360 (85.7 million) to Xbox One (~ 58 million). ~30% drop gen-over-gen. However some XBO estimates put it closer to ~ 50 million, which would be an ~40% drop gen-over-gen. Which of the 6 factors did XBO suffer from?
Answer: #s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. However, there are some caveats. The first 2-3 years did have some high-profile 1P/3P exclusives, so #2 can probably be reduced to (10%).
MS didn't do Day 1 PC for all games until late 2019/2020, but the pattern of ports was already being established before then. So instead of (25%) that one can probably be closer to (10%). XBO did well in US & UK, so it didn't bomb in every global market. We can probably reduce #3 to 10%.
As far as 3P partnerships, MS did have some last gen like EA (TitanFall), the Cuphead devs, Moon Studio, Bandai-Namco (Elden Ring reveal), and a few others. So that one can probably be reduced to 5%. While it did have bad traditional marketing & messaging, MS abused use of astroturfing and grassroots messaging & marketing to make up for that among hardcore & core enthusiasts, so I think that can reduce down to 5%. And for underperforming specs, that was kind of resolved with the One X mid-gen upgrade, so I'd reduce that to 5%.
So it goes from 100% to 45%. I could reduce some of the percentages again but I've been trying to stick with 5% increments here.
And now...
Xbox 360 (85.7 million) to XBS (at current trajectory, lucky to hit 43 million by EOY 2027). ~50% drop from brand peak. Which of the 6 factors does XBS suffer from?
Answer: #s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Similar to XBO though, there are caveats. Day 1 for PC is a full contributing factor, so that amount stays the same. MS have had some big releases the past few years, like Gears 5 Hivebusters, Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite and, after acquiring Zenimax, games like Starfield. The problem is that many of these either underperformed with critics & gamers, or they are not "actual" exclusives since they're also on PC from Day 1. However I'd reduce this to 10% because of those factors.
Regional focus globally has been terrible, even in once-strong markets like US & UK, but it could be worst, so I'd reduce this to (10%). Traditional marketing/messaging is weak, but during the pandemic aspects of their offering (particularly Series S & Game Pass) did pan out well, plus again they have heavy shill/astroturfing presence that balances out a lot of the lacking traditional marketing/messaging, so I'd reduce this to (5%). Lack of long-term 3P relationships has definitely hurt the console, but considering MS acquired to massive 3P publishers to heavily offset that (not to mention purchased other studios prior), I don't really see this being an issue for them, until it manifests that these acquisitions can't put out a steady amount of quality content.
The double-edged sword there being, even if they do, NOW that they're focusing on a multiplatform strategy, the console won't really benefit much from it anyway! As for underperforming specs, I think that mostly comes down to how you'd feel about the Series S. Most were not expecting Series X to curbstomp the PS5 just because of 2 extra TF and more memory bandwidth (because that bandwidth is segmented). Overall between multiplats it and PS5 have been about even, with a good number of small wins for PS5 and some small wins for Series X.
However, the deficits between them in those wins is nowhere near as pronounced as the PS4's regular wins over the XBO. It's also arguable that many situations where Series X underperformed are due to the Series S, but that system was intentionally developed to be lower-powered in the first place. I don't think its target demo cares if it's coming up a bit short of early marketing fluff, so I don't think "underperforming specs" is a factor here. If so, at best it's (5%), and you can probably shave off 5% from one of the others to balance this out.
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So ending this, yes Day 1 on PC is not the only factor for the decline in Xbox console hardware sales, but it is a factor, and strongly so in the case of Xbox Series. Now, if Sony did Day 1 for all games on PC but didn't skimp on the other five things mentioned above, then I suppose one way of looking at that is they'd only see lifetime sales drop by up to 25%. But the question is, 25% from
which? From the PS4 (120 million > 90 million), or the PS3 (90 million > 67.5 - 76.5 million) , or the PS2 or the PS1?
The reason I used gen-over-gen for the non-MS systems but switch to 'brand peak' for Xbox, is because both Sony and Nintendo have shown heavy sea-sawing at times but mostly seem stable at a given number of 100+ million per generation. Their performance from one gen can be directly compared to the gen before.
Microsoft are similar to SEGA, in that they've now had back-to-back gens of decline, but where I feel the decline rate for the last/current console doesn't reflect the actual timing of impactful decisions that led to brand rot. Most of the bad Xbox decisions MS made affecting Series were actually set in place in the last years of the XBO, and XBS saw an artificial jump in sales due to the pandemic plus scant supply of not only PS5s but PS4s as well. If it weren't for the pandemic Series'd probably be at least 5 million behind where it currently is. However,
IF some of the moves Microsoft have made since 2020 prove fruitful, that could explain any uptick in console sales bucking the gen-over-gen drops I could try gauging with this method.
Though really, none of those moves will have a notable impact on console sales, since Microsoft seem to be prioritizing non-Xbox consoles aggressively going forward, plus again, every game is still Day 1 on PC now. Back to SEGA, while Dreamcast sold slightly less than Saturn, it also did about as well as Saturn in a shorter amount of time. 26 months for Dreamcast vs. 48+ months for Saturn.
So I'd say with Dreamcast, SEGA were actually showing a
positive trajectory in console sales, meaning a lot of the problems they made with Saturn were corrected with decisions they made for Dreamcast. The only problem is that Dreamcast sales weren't fast enough for their targets, not that it wasn't selling. SEGA had internal targets for Dreamcast where it needed to be doing more than 100% better than Saturn launch-aligned, and it wasn't hitting those targets. That's why Dreamcast was ultimately their last console.
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