Microsoft Game Studios' president Phil Spencer has told Official Xbox Magazine that he believes it's easier to sell offline single player games on consoles than it is on PC.
Spencer commented that is a "real challenge" to achieve success on PC with non-connected, lone player titles on PC due to the prevalence of services such as Steam and Origin.
"A unique capability on consoles is to play a game like Ryse; there may have some of that on PC, but most of the PC games are service based, just because the retail market for PC games is a real challenge: to sell a single-player offline game.
"There's some things that have been successful, like Diablo, but it's more challenging. I think console can actually manage on both ends of the spectrum, we can put beautiful, long triple-A content on-screen — it's a unique place for that content – but also embrace the breadth of content that comes from smaller studios and us as publishers, we just have to be aware that both ends of the spectrum are important and can be successful."
His views come in spite of the fact that it was Microsoft who effectively created the online gaming space on consoles with the launch of Halo 2 and Xbox Live in 2004.
Additionally, and notoriously, Microsoft's original policies for the Xbox One would have required a daily internet check creating an effectively always-on eco-system on the console. The company's justification for this requirement was the ability to share games with up to ten others as part of the Family Sharing feature which was scrapped alongside the internet checks.
As late as June, 2013 – just five months before the release of the Xbox One – Microsoft contemplated launching the system without a disc drive, Spencer recently revealed. This was because people do not believe they "own" digital content in the same way they possess physical media according to Xbox marketing head Yusuf Mehdi.
Spencer's views are interesting in light of what Microsoft hoped to achieve with the Xbox One initially and which, according to Redmond's Albert Penello, could see a return "when the time is right"; at least so far as game sharing is concerned. While it may be easier to sell offline games on consoles the fact is, both the PS4 and Xbox One require a connection to get the most of them and you need to download a patch in order to be able to use the Xbox One offline – a legacy of Microsoft's initial vision – if the original plans for the console had come to fruition, there really would be no such thing as "offline" on the platform.
