Certain third-party publishers are reportedly expressing concerns about support for Xbox consoles in the future.
That’s from the head of GamesIndustry.biz, Chris Dring, (and spotted by VGC). Dring appeared in the latest GI Microcast, saying that after GDC 2024, his feeling is that “Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer”.
According to Dring, two publishers he spoke to — “I heard it from a very prominent company and one not so prominent” — was that Xbox’s sales performance in Europe has been “flatlining”.
Per GI.biz’s own sales reporting, sales of Xbox Series X and S hardware have exhibited a clear downward trend across 2023 and 2024. But it gets even more brutal than that.
“The phrase one major company who released a big game last year said [was], ‘I don’t know why we bothered supporting it’.”
Oof.
This follows news of publisher frustration with the cheaper Series S console. Despite featuring much lower spec than the Series X, one Xbox’s hard demands is for every game to target 60 FPS performance on Series S. This has created optimisation headaches, demanding a lot of extra work to support a platform with a user base smaller than PC or PlayStation 5, both of which would be considered a higher sales priority by higher-ups.
We can link this information with a few extra data points from the last few months. Xbox admitted just last year that it had lost the console wars, with Series X|S sales outperformed 2-to-1 by the PS5, further confirming its difficulties moving units. Then there’s the recent news that Xbox plans to bring some of its major exclusives to PlayStation (with, Dring says, many more to come), and a picture begins to coalesce. You can see why publishers would be getting itchy. The people who control the purse strings would be asking why they’re devoting so many resources to hitting performance parity on Xbox platforms when those games are now just going to land on PlayStation anyway.
Despite this, all of Xbox’s recent assurances indicate that it is not looking to get out of the hardware game. If so, GI.biz’s GDC chats predict quite a grim road ahead for the once-dominant American hardware maker.
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