Redfall Proves that Microsoft’s Xbox Strategy Works (Premium)

It’s the story of an eagerly awaited video game that was so poorly made that Microsoft delayed it for a year, and yet still released it in lackluster shape. No, I’m not talking about Halo Infinite, though I could be. I’m talking about Redfall, an open-world co-op vampire shooter—yes, really—that has been lambasted by critics for a variety of problems.

But this is the one that struck me the most: IGN, a nearly 30-year-old video game reviews website, and thus the grand old dame of this industry, declared that Redfall was so bad that it was a “worst-case scenario” that “tests the patience of Xbox fans.” The theory being, I guess, that Xbox fans face an existential crisis brought on by the dominance of the Sony PlayStation and the surprising fate of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a move that was supposed to change everything.

Please.

Leaving aside the obvious—that video games don’t live or die on opening weekend sales like movies, and can, and are, updated regularly, a situation that should answer all of the complaints—we need to remember a few things about where Xbox is now as a platform and where it’s heading. I’ve written a lot about Xbox head Phil Spencer in the past, about how his truthful, plain-spoken everyman approach to revitalizing Xbox in the wake of the Xbox One debacle is the greatest gift that Xbox fans have ever received. But let me draw a few parallels and then get more specific in making my case for this man and the platform he leads.

Phil Spencer is to Xbox what Terry Myerson was to Windows: he took a product line that was dinged badly by his predecessor, and he turned things around, giving fans what they wanted and, as important, what they needed. Phil Spencer is likewise to Xbox what Satya Nadella is (perceived to be) to Microsoft: he took a powerful but aging set of products and forced it to diversify and modernize and address new needs and wants, and in doing so he made the thing better and more resilient to whatever market changes come down the road. The Xbox of today is not the Xbox of yesteryear. It’s better.

More specifically, Phil Spencer took a platform that was all about a single thing—people buying individual games at retail and installing them on a console—and expanded the definition of the platform to meet its customers wherever they want to game. Xbox today is cross-platform and provides multiple entry points to gaming that include not just the console, but also PCs, mobile devices, and even smart TVs. It has expanded access to gaming by giving people more choice. You can still buy games and play them on a single device if you like. Or you can subscribe to an Xbox Game Pass subscription and choose from hundreds of games for a relatively low monthly price, or even stream hundreds of games for a few dollars more.

This diversification makes for a healthier Xbox, and this is exactly what Big Tech firms are doing (or trying to do) at a higher level by moving beyond a single hit product and ensuring that an unexpected market change won’t take down the entire business. For example, Apple has seen some success with non-iPhone hardware, but its services business is now its second-biggest and fastest-growing business. Microsoft recently surpassed the point where over 50 percent of its revenues probably now come from cloud computing-related businesses. (And on the failure side, Google has never found a second major source of income: it remains tethered to its ad business, which could collapse if AI renders Google Search less necessary.)

There is an ongoing debate about whether some part of the gaming market will replace some other part of the gaming market. The most obvious and recent example is regulators at the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) taking the insane position that the nascent cloud streaming market could somehow catapult Microsoft unfairly into a dominant position in a market that, by itself, will likely never amount to more than some minority share of quarterly revenues because of the scientific reality of lag and latency. But these debates sort of miss the point, and they absolutely miss the genius of Phil Spencer’s strategy: Microsoft isn’t dropping consoles so it can switch to cloud streaming. It is adding cloud streaming and the other things that make Xbox today so much more than it used to be to the mix. He is making Xbox more.

Xbox Game Pass is a key part of that strategy, but Xbox Game Pass only makes sense when there are more entry points for gaming. That is, it can’t just be about a console. That’s why there’s a PC Game Pass option for PC gamers, and that’s why Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which provides subscribers with massive libraries of games on both console and PC, also includes the Xbox Cloud Gaming option, which brings Xbox games to users of smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, PCs, and other devices. It’s an option, another way to enjoy the Xbox ecosystem. It’s not just a new idea, it’s a competitive advantage.

With all that in mind, Redfall arrived to almost universally negative reviews this week. Critics are citing it as yet another example of how Microsoft is far behind Sony when it comes to exclusives. It’s Microsoft’s first $70 game title, and it perhaps doesn’t justify that price hike. It was delayed by almost a year, and it still arrived in what feels like an unfinished state, one of the key issues there being that it only runs at 30 FPS on Microsoft’s consoles, though the studio that makes it promises it will hit 60 FPS eventually. And … whatever. I haven’t played the game.

But I will, and here’s why: Redfall isn’t just available to purchase, it’s also available via Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, and that means that I can just install the game as part of the subscription I’m already paying for. But it’s also available via Xbox Cloud Gaming, a perk of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and that means that I don’t even need to install the damn thing to find out if it’s worth bothering with or not: I can just stream the game, semi-instantly, on my Xbox, PC, or other devices, and find out for myself.

And that, folks, is the freaking point, the reason why Microsoft’s—Phil Spencer’s—Xbox strategy is working. Because this game is available via so many entry points, each more frictionless than the last, I can as a gamer and a consumer more easily evaluate and play this game in the manner I prefer. I don’t have to just throw $70 at some retailer and buy the thing outright, only to discover that maybe it is the dog that reviewers think it is.

And maybe it is. I don’t care either way. I’m just glad that Xbox Game Pass exists. Instead of paying $70 and then discovering that maybe I just wasted my money, I can pay $10 per month for Xbox Game Pass. And if this is the only game I play for the next six months, guess what? I still come out ahead. But the point of Xbox Game Pass is that I have hundreds and hundreds of choices. So I win either way.

Put simply, Redfall doesn’t betray a weakness in the Xbox strategy, it highlights its strengths.