History has proven that if you wish to stay alive in the video game industry as a console maker, you must do multiple things to not only have success but to have longevity. For Nintendo, they have been able to do that since the 1980s, reviving the gaming industry multiple times over and recently having the biggest console launch in history. Sony came in swinging with the PlayStation, helped change the game, and has been mostly consistent ever since. As for Microsoft with its Xbox brand, things have been a bit more difficult, and while they may have “made a place for themselves,” that place is slowly changing into something that many don’t recognize, including some of their veterans.
One such veteran is Laura Fryer, whom many of you may know as one of the OGs of Microsoft Game Studios. She helped make many titles before leaving to do various kinds of YouTube content.
Recently, the Xbox brand announced that several “new pieces of hardware” are coming, including teaming up with ROG, Meta, and even AMD to help keep their hardware future alive. Yet, Fryer is not convinced of that in the slightest. In fact, she basically called it “all show and no substance.”
“Obviously, as one of the founding members of the Xbox team, I’m not pleased with where things are today. I don’t love watching all of the value that I helped create slowly get eroded away. I’m sad because from my perspective, it looks like Xbox has no desire or literally can’t ship hardware anymore. So this [ROG Ally] partnership is about a slow exit from the hardware business completely.”
That might seem like a bold statement, but there’s plenty to back her up. First, Xbox Series X/S sales are terrible beyond measure, especially in countries like Japan, where they’ve already been outpaced by the Nintendo Switch 2 in less than a month! The ROG Ally partnership is very much an attempt to try and siphon off Switch 2 sales, but the catch is that it’s not about playing that brand’s games on the system but being able to “play anywhere.”
Xbox has been making a huge shift into multiplatform gaming recently, and the results speak for themselves as “Microsoft-made titles” are selling better on PS5 and other platforms than on Microsoft’s own console by a large margin. That’s why Fryer made this bold declaration in her video:
“Personally, I think Xbox hardware is dead. The plan appears to be to just drive everybody to Game Pass. “
Whether this is true or not will become clear soon enough.
