Ask Paul: April 2 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and Happy Easter if you’re celebrating. Let’s get the weekend off to an early start with the first Ask Paul for April 2021.
Microsoft’s gaming strategy
Vladimir asks:

I have a somewhat provocative question about microsoft and gaming. I definitevely prefer Microsoft over any other big tech company, but I am starting to get a bit concerned about microsoft buying everything in the gaming world and adding everything to gamepass. Can this become a monoculture and lack of competition be bad for gaming in general?

This is a great question and it’s something I’ve internally debated.

As an Xbox fan, I was long burned by the platform exclusives strategy championed by Sony and Nintendo, and I felt that this unfairly punished gamers for picking a particular console or ecosystem. Microsoft’s approach, I thought, was platform-agnostic and friendlier to gamers, and those few games that were “exclusives” were exclusive to Xbox the platform, not a particular console version.

When the Xbox One failed out of the gate in 2013, Microsoft had to rethink how it did things and the result is what I think of as the single-best videogame platform there is. There’s a lot that goes into that, but one of the key pieces is backward compatibility: Not only does the Xbox Series X|S play all Xbox One games, and improve them in some way while doing so, it can also play a lot of Xbox 360 games and some OG Xbox games. And now they’re pushing backward compatible games to Xbox Game Streaming (xCloud), further enhancing our investments in this ecosystem.

Microsoft’s more recent shift to snapping up game studios and, most recently, in revealing that some future Bethesda games will be Xbox exclusives, can be seen as both the next logical step in this broader strategy of making Xbox great and, conversely, as a troubling move to do what Sony and Nintendo are doing and limiting some games from appearing on other platforms.

I see both sides of this, and while the latter is still troubling to me, I think the benefits outweigh the negatives, especially from the perspective of someone who has made big investments in time and money in the Xbox platform. This is Microsoft showing us that it’s serious about Xbox.

Ultimately, I think we’re going to continue to see a combination of cross-platform and Xbox-only games from Microsoft’s studios. And thanks to the broader reach of Xbox, now and in the future, even those Xbox exclusives will be playable across many platforms, including Xbox consoles, Windows 10 PCs, and, via streaming, Android devices (today) and the web, Windows, iPhone, and iPad (in the near future). When Sony releases an exclusive in 2021 or going forward, by comparison, it will only work on PlayStation 5. That’s it.

All this said, I do still feel that being open, which in this case means being heterogenous, wins the day. But even PS5 users could conceivably someday play Xbox exclusives via xCloud, either thro...