A storm requires alternating currents. Over the last week, news broke that Sony has lost interest in porting their games to PC and would be corralling PlayStation’s exclusives back into the pen. On Xbox’s end, new CEO Asha Sharma announced that the next console, “Project Helix,” is currently in development, though it does not seem to be correcting course for any past mistakes. While fans aren’t thrilled with Sony pulling out of PC ports, you don’t have to be happy with a sound decision. If these companies want to sail in choppy waters, they better have a hell of a boat.
The console wars died down not because any side won, but because it became irrelevant. Major games, seeking to make their gigantic budgets back, went platform agnostic. Where once companies had splurged on making consumers identify with specific console platforms, suddenly where you play games had become a much less defining factor.
When COVID began, streaming services across the board experienced a huge boost in traffic, Game Pass included. It became Xbox’s defining feature, coupled with an acquisition spree to keep the library stocked. Unfortunately, like every other streaming service it hit a ceiling, having to manage waning sales and an unsustainable burn rate. The “Xbox everywhere” mantra backfired, hurting software and hardware numbers and making a runt out of the confused ROG Ally. Project Helix hasn’t crystalized Xbox’s future. Its only hard promise is to be a home for Xbox and PC gaming, though even that lacks assuring detail.
PlayStation does not suffer these problems. They are very good at selling hardware, with the PS5 moving units even this late into its lifespan. With one devastating exception, Sony is also good at moving games. But no matter the sales, each of these games are costing more to make and requiring more time. To soften the blow, Sony began porting these games to PC. Surprisingly, sales were more sluggish on wider platforms, with the one exception being Helldivers 2 (which unlike other PlayStation ports, launched concurrently on console and PC).
Staring down the atrophy of these development cycles, Sony’s focused its attention on live-service games. Landing a “forever hit” like Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto V could keep its audience locked in, a prize it’s willing to risk any humiliation for. Traditionally hardware sold at a loss, with software, from first-party revenue to third-party licenses, balancing out the books. With player trends increasingly narrowing in on fewer, older games, both Microsoft and Sony have been driven into some self-destructive feedback loops to overcome this.
With word of next-gen consoles in development comes the anxiety of a very uncertain future. If hardware sales sunk costs before, the tariffs roller coaster and RAM-crunch fueled by AI data centers will only intensify this. Each price increase is going to shed another layer of players, and it’s not as if the younger demographics aren’t finding their kicks elsewhere.
It feels like Sony has turned a page this month. It’s calling its chickens back to the roost, and even its cross-media development blitz seems to be winding down (I suspect because it woke up one morning realizing it only has a handful of characters to make TV shows about). A return to high-profile exclusives is a pretty obvious argument for buying its console over another, but it’s still a little flimsy if those exclusives are limited to one or two a year. Ideally the company would start reconstructing an environment that supports games big, medium and small. Ironically that’s a novelty Game Pass has been good at. If only it made money.
The politics of Xbox are more complicated. Sony is invested in selling PlayStation, movies, and television sets. Microsoft has a stake in PC gaming, a split that’s fractured the argument for any dedicated Xbox over the last decade. New leadership can spell a new direction, but with all the turmoil it almost looks like they are xeroxing their pages instead of turning them.
With rising costs and waning interest, these next consoles are going to require a much more confident sales pitch than the profit-maxing we’ve suffered for the current gen. A device that believes in itself. You know. Like Nintendo. Who in less than a year, have supported the Switch 2 with new entries in Mario Kart, Donkey Kong, Metroid and Pokemon. Finding success in hard times. Might be something to that.
