Yesterday was an interesting day for the gaming community. Specifically, Gamescom Opening Night Live arrived once again, and it revealed several titles, including some that people were excited about and others that fans raised eyebrows over. Easily, one of the most important things that happened at the show was the reveal that yet another Xbox exclusive, in this case, the game featuring Indiana Jones, would head to the PS5 just six months after its release on Xbox Series X/S. Many saw this as a “broken promise” by the heads of Xbox, like Phil Spencer, who claimed that it “wouldn’t” go to the PS5.
However, during an interview at Gamescom, Phil Spencer attempted to backtrack the negative thoughts and wanted to make it clear that Xbox is “doing fine” and that there “wasn’t anything wrong” with the Indiana Jones title going to another console.
“Going to the PlayStation announcement, obviously, last spring we launched four games – two of them on the Switch, four of them on PlayStation – and we said we were going to learn,” he said in the interview. “I think at the Showcase I might have said that from our learning, we’re going to do more. So I look at this: how can we make our games as strong as possible, [ensure that] our platform continues to grow both on console, PC and cloud, and I think it’s just going to be a strategy that works for us.””
But many are calling this out as bull, as the numbers don’t back up what Spencer is saying, and yet, he doubled down on it by making another claim about the Xbox brand:
“What I see when I look is that our franchises are getting stronger, our Xbox console players this year are as high as they’ve ever been, so I look at it and I say, our player numbers are going up for the console platform, our franchises are as strong as they’ve ever been… and we run a business.”
Again, people aren’t buying it, and Spencer appears to be doing the “classic business trope” of “double talk,” alongside “saying one thing but meaning another.”
For example, notice that he said that the “Xbox console players” are up, but not that the Xbox console SALES numbers are up. That’s a huge difference. We know that Xbox Series X/S is struggling mightily and that even Xbox Game Pass isn’t doing what Spencer and others hoped it would.
Many fear what will happen if Xbox can’t bring something more to the table. Losing exclusives might just be the next step down a very dark road.
