Every time I read any Xbox news, I immediately remember the email that Phil Spencer sent to Satya Nadella when PS5 was announced. The email gets funnier as the days go by, and as additional context gets added in the form of news like the OP.
Inserting below part of the email thread that I like the most:
Even as I type this I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help myself.
We’ve all lived with 7 years of starting off a generation with a price and performance (and messaging)disadvantage to PS4 with Xbox One. I have to admit this morning when I woke up knowing the PS5 reveal was today that the stress level was higher than normal. Now after almost 12 hours of soaking in their unveil, taking apart their specs and looking at the community responses I just wanted to say that I’m proud of our team.
We have a better product than Sony does, not just on hardware but equally important on the software platform and services on top of the hardware. We have the ingredients of a winning plan. I felt the feedback from the BoD discussion on being too confident and maybe this will just reinforce that perception, I get the need to be humbly confident but today was a good day for us.
We haven’t won anything. And I know we have hard discussion about pricing, P&L, investments etc. This mail isn’t trying to scoop any of that, those discussions really matter. But we can take confidence in our product truth hereand I do believe any conversation needs to start with believing in that. This was a good day for Xbox.
Yup, best controller design for my hands. If only the quality of its components wasn‘t so crap. Drifting sticks, squeaky triggers, double pressing buttons, I had it all. I thought an elite controller would be of better quality, got one, and the plastic of the right shoulder button straightup broke within a year. No dropping, no throwing, it just broke from normal use lol
The form‘s great, the buttons (when they work), are great, the sticks (when they work) are great. It just doesn‘t last long past warranty. Thankfully they‘re on sale every year for like 35 bucks but I‘d rather they were a tad more expensive with better quality components… I guess they don‘t mind people having to buy more of them either though…
The XBone controller is more comfortable, but I really like the analog/adaptive triggers on the DualSense. That gives it the edge imo. The center button/pad can also be cool if used correctly.
I recently played using one of the new xbox controllers, I much prefer the ps5 controllers, with or without the fancy force feedback. The old 360 controllers were great compared to the playstation controllers at the time, but the new ones don’t feel good.
I have never used Xbox controllers so I can’t speak for their ergonomics or ease of use.
But I definitely find the DualSense controller to be more aesthetically appealing, partly due to its symmetry, and I have to admit, as silly as it sounds, that it was the second most important factor when purchasing PS4 Pro around a decade ago.
The first most important factor being the games catalogue.
While moving to the current generation, I did give Xbox Series X an honest consideration. But the games catalogue made me choose PS5 over it once again.
In hindsight, especially after owning a Steam Deck, I am glad I stuck with PlayStation.
Its almost as bad as playing on the wrong invert y setting.
Yikes! I never thought about controller layouts in this way.
Did everyone in this comments section forget that Microsoft is in fact done with traditional consoles? “Everything is an Xbox”, and they’ll still release new hardware, but they are talking about Windows gaming, not a platform where they’ll have to do cert for a discrete spec. PlayStation games are coming to other platforms now, too. The old console model and console wars are over.
Because companies fucked up consoles. All we ever wanted was split screen games with our friends on the couch. Not a single-player-only Need for Speed for 70€ I can only play with an online subscription with random people over the internet.
They made consoles more and more similar to computers over the years, instead of focusing on the social character consoles used to have.
I’ve been saying something similar for years: Consoles going online was the worst thing to ever happen to them. Their selling point used to be that you’d put in a cartridge/disc, and it would “just work”. Now it has all the downsides of PC gaming, with none of the upsides.
The next console wars will be the Switch 2 vs the horrible sinking feeling in your gut.
People seemingly forget that the Switch moved as many consoles as the PS4 and Xbox One combined. I don’t even mean people in online forums, because sure. I mean people in the games industry.
For the record, people also suck at selling new live service games despite (and possibly because) Fortnite, Call of Duty, CS and Roblox have all the players and won’t let them go. Don’t see anybody stop trying, for better and worse.
I’m sure Nintendo is very happy to let everybody ignore that they’ve locked in 150 million players and routinely tap into many millions of them for their first party releases, I’m just here to remind people when they forget and overstate the position of Sony, MS or even Valve.
Microsoft didn’t have to declare consoles over. The market did. Yes, Steam is the big winner, but Sony isn’t gaining customers either; perhaps even losing them on consoles.
Sony said its monthly active gaming users for the year ended April 1, 2025, were up 5% at 124 million users, which is the highest in PlayStation’s history.
Me too. That’s a fact, but it doesn’t refute what I said. It’s a rosy picture that sounds like it refutes what I said, which is why Sony reports it that way, but it doesn’t. 124 million users includes PS4. What the article even mentions in the headline is that it’s behind PS4 at the same point in its life, even with the absence of a real competitor this time around in Xbox. Does it sound healthy to you that 5 years into a console generation, Sony can’t convince people to move to PS5 when all they play is Minecraft or Fortnite?
EDIT: Btw, Sony categorizes monthly actives as “an estimated total number of unique accounts that played games or used services on the PlayStation Network during the last month of the quarter and is based on company research, and may be updated in the future”, emphasis mine. My PS4 only streams video these days, and it sure sounds like it’s counted in that same metric.
… I get that this is a REALLY important topic to you - but the article also explains how the PS5 is much more expensive (inflation adjusted) at this point in time compared to the PS4. That’s very much part of “doing well”.
Also, that the PS4 numbers are included is no different from the PS3 before - and your claim was that Sony was losing customers at that.
I said perhaps, because our data is always lagging behind real time by a few months, and the difference between the two generations’ units sold is close enough that the gap could have been covered in the time it takes to report on it. We don’t know that it has, but it’s possible. Increased spending on exclusives, and fewer of them, has led to decreased margins on them, and the bulk of PlayStation’s revenue is coming from third parties that are available everywhere while PlayStation’s own games are going multiplatform as well, a thing that they never used to do. There’s no L for me to take here.
It’s a shame because the Series X is an absolutely superb device. The fast storage, quick resume, performance, noise level etc are all incredible, and the backwards compatibility, console streaming, and appeal of game pass make the Series X a wonderful gaming machine. I couldn’t be happier with it.
We all know the reasons why it isn’t as successful as the PS5, but the Series X as a price-to-value product has been woefully under-appreciated.
We definitely play on the XSX as a family a lot more than the PS5 that’s collecting dust upstairs. Its smaller form factor makes it much easier to use as a gaming console in our main living area. But yeah, GamePass is a crazy good deal if you know how to use the conversion trick (buy GamePass core for like 2 years for $80-100 from key reseller, then convert it to Ultimate on MS site at a 2:3 ratio or whatever).
That being said, everyone knows GamePass isn’t sustainable long-term. Microsoft truly is killing their gaming division with such short-sighted planning.
Rather, it isn’t sustainable at its current pricing model. It takes the average studio team 3-5 years to make 1 AAA game.
Microsoft’s internal studios (excluding the ones they just bought over the last 4-5 years) have made Halo Infinite and… Hmm… Is the Forza studio considered OG first-party? I’ll just lump them in as well, since they’ve been associated with MS for awhile. So 2 major games in the last ~8 years. Then you have the major studios they just bought: Bethesda and Blizzard/Activision. Bethesda has released 2 major AAA games in the last 5 years while under MS ownership (I think Doom Eternal came out before the purchase). Blizzard has done 1 and Activision has done 1 CoD game.
So MS paid $7.5b for Zenimax/Bethesda and $68.7b for Blizz/Activision, for a whopping total of $76.2b. Starfield sold around 3m copies, Diablo 4 has generated around $1b in revenue since release (chose revenue since it’s a live service game and that includes copies sold), and Black Ops 6 has sold… I’m not sure, a quick search doesn’t show any hard numbers, just Xbox propaganda that it “was the biggest release in franchise history.” (I say propaganda bc many of their larger shareholders weren’t super pleased with how much it cost to purchase Activision, so of course they wanted to spin it as being a smart investment).
And it costs MS a lot of money to license some of the bigger games to come to GamePass.
I just don’t see it being sustainable without cost increases. And if the cost goes up, they’ll turn off customers. And we’ve already seen that their cheaper, indie studios aren’t safe from being axed despite releasing successful hits.
Their current pricing model is between $10 and $20 per month for somewhere north of 30M subscribers. The ability to get Game Pass for less than that was largely discontinued two years ago. You can conservatively estimate that to be $300M in revenue every month. Every two months, they can fund a Call of Duty game. Every month, they can more than fund one Starfield. That’s only Game Pass revenue without including game sales. I’ll also remind you that Microsoft publishes 6 of the top 10 PlayStation games last month; they’re still selling lots of games outside of Game Pass. “Excluding the [studios] they bought over the last 4-5 years” is a major omission. Their licensing deals for third parties on Game Pass have seen significantly less investment in the past few years; as their first party library increases, they’re less and less necessary. I’m also curious where you got that number for Starfield units sold, because my back of the napkin math puts it at more than 3M copies on Steam alone.
Minecraft also seems to get frequently forgotten about when talking about Microsoft gaming too. It makes Microsoft around £300m per year in games sales. That’s just the game. Imagine what the merchandise figures are on top of that.
I don’t think game pass is anywhere near unsustainable, when we consider what is actually sustaining it.
I’ve been gaming primarily on Xbox since the 360. After Microsoft bought and closed Tango though? I literally vowed to never buy another Xbox product again. I can’t even remember the last time I booted my Series X
I can’t understand the nonsensical generational naming scheme on XBox so I just avoid getting one because I don’t want to get a previous generation. And my scattered brain keeps forgetting the info I look up because it’s inconsequential to actual living in these wild times.
Agreed, I guess I meant it potentially had a great interface, I have memories (I SWEAR they are real -I scream into the void) that the xbox 360 had a really slick interface at one point with very clear effective panels/tabs that was progressively enshittified… but if it hadn’t… it would have been nice.
That was a different timeline, if such a one where microsoft didn’t enshittify xbox exists.
With the “everything is an Xbox” mantra, there’s no reason to have a capable PC and an Xbox anymore. I don’t mind waiting for PS games on my PC either, leaving only Nintendo still having some appeal.
Unfortunately Nintendo adults will soy out and apend a bajillion dollars on anything Nintendo does at this point so long as it has pokemon or zelda on it.
Important thing to remember about the “console wars.”
Other than the Nintendo Wii (iirc), most consoles sell at a loss at the beginning of the generation. They eventually turn a profit on console sales, but console sales aren’t the point.
Game sales are.
When each console was its own very specific architecture and games needed to be designed specifically for them, console sales matter a lot because that’s how you’d sell games.
But now that architectures are similar (if not the same), cross-compilation has become easier than ever. It’s why you see Sony finally releasing first party titles on PC.
Microsoft knows full well that their console sales aren’t great, but that’s okay for them. Their PC sales are. Many of their titles sell on Steam. And they sell some of their titles on PlayStation.
They’ll continue to make some form of console because without it they lose out on millions of Game Pass subscriptions from people who don’t want to make the initial investment in a gaming PC, or deal with the complexity, but their goal of making that next console more and more like a PC fits perfectly in their model.
It’s a shame the Series X has sold so poorly, it’s a great console, but I doubt Microsoft is too worried about “losing” the console wars to Sony. The game has changed.
The one thing Xbox has had going for it for a while now is actual usage. There were metrics out there that even with the smaller player base, users engaged with and had more playtime than PS. This was true well into the current gen.
They didn’t bring new techno as they did previously with kinetic, pricing was indecent, the hub is such a mess : it looks like Amazon not like a GUI for gaming.
It’s not surprising if they are loosing customers
They’ve also sold less than half the number of XBox One units compared to PS4, and like a third compared to the Switch, so they’ve been lagging behind for a while.
These days they don’t really seem to focus on console gaming at all. I’m curious to see if we’ll even get a traditional “next gen” console. It might just be a console UI for Windows PCs instead, with some third-party produced “console”-PCs.
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Good, don’t buy an Xbox. Microsoft is in bed with Israel.
Every time I read any Xbox news, I immediately remember the email that Phil Spencer sent to Satya Nadella when PS5 was announced. The email gets funnier as the days go by, and as additional context gets added in the form of news like the OP.
Inserting below part of the email thread that I like the most:
lol, the ps5 controller alone is enough reason to purchase over the xbox. I have both and games are just more fun on the PS5, its better in every way.
meh, the controller is the only thing i prefer on xbox.
Yup, best controller design for my hands. If only the quality of its components wasn‘t so crap. Drifting sticks, squeaky triggers, double pressing buttons, I had it all. I thought an elite controller would be of better quality, got one, and the plastic of the right shoulder button straightup broke within a year. No dropping, no throwing, it just broke from normal use lol
The form‘s great, the buttons (when they work), are great, the sticks (when they work) are great. It just doesn‘t last long past warranty. Thankfully they‘re on sale every year for like 35 bucks but I‘d rather they were a tad more expensive with better quality components… I guess they don‘t mind people having to buy more of them either though…
The XBone controller is more comfortable, but I really like the analog/adaptive triggers on the DualSense. That gives it the edge imo. The center button/pad can also be cool if used correctly.
I recently played using one of the new xbox controllers, I much prefer the ps5 controllers, with or without the fancy force feedback. The old 360 controllers were great compared to the playstation controllers at the time, but the new ones don’t feel good.
I have never used Xbox controllers so I can’t speak for their ergonomics or ease of use.
But I definitely find the DualSense controller to be more aesthetically appealing, partly due to its symmetry, and I have to admit, as silly as it sounds, that it was the second most important factor when purchasing PS4 Pro around a decade ago.
The first most important factor being the games catalogue.
I guess at this point, with muscle memory playing a large part, that what you had before is what you’ll have next.
I cant use the PlayStation controllers, I need the asymmetry of the sticks. Its almost as bad as playing on the wrong invert y setting.
While moving to the current generation, I did give Xbox Series X an honest consideration. But the games catalogue made me choose PS5 over it once again.
In hindsight, especially after owning a Steam Deck, I am glad I stuck with PlayStation.
Yikes! I never thought about controller layouts in this way.
Did everyone in this comments section forget that Microsoft is in fact done with traditional consoles? “Everything is an Xbox”, and they’ll still release new hardware, but they are talking about Windows gaming, not a platform where they’ll have to do cert for a discrete spec. PlayStation games are coming to other platforms now, too. The old console model and console wars are over.
Because companies fucked up consoles. All we ever wanted was split screen games with our friends on the couch. Not a single-player-only Need for Speed for 70€ I can only play with an online subscription with random people over the internet.
They made consoles more and more similar to computers over the years, instead of focusing on the social character consoles used to have.
I’ve been saying something similar for years: Consoles going online was the worst thing to ever happen to them. Their selling point used to be that you’d put in a cartridge/disc, and it would “just work”. Now it has all the downsides of PC gaming, with none of the upsides.
Unfortunately co op was killed by the constant pressure to have the next big graphical wank fest game.
Cause (people didn’t buy Xboxes) and effect (Microsoft declared consoles over).
Steam won, btw. Not Windows. The next “console war” will be Steamboxes vs Playstation 6.
The next console wars will be the Switch 2 vs the horrible sinking feeling in your gut.
People seemingly forget that the Switch moved as many consoles as the PS4 and Xbox One combined. I don’t even mean people in online forums, because sure. I mean people in the games industry.
Nintendo sells lots of games on Switch. The games industry in general don’t.
And whose fault is that?
For the record, people also suck at selling new live service games despite (and possibly because) Fortnite, Call of Duty, CS and Roblox have all the players and won’t let them go. Don’t see anybody stop trying, for better and worse.
I’m sure Nintendo is very happy to let everybody ignore that they’ve locked in 150 million players and routinely tap into many millions of them for their first party releases, I’m just here to remind people when they forget and overstate the position of Sony, MS or even Valve.
Microsoft didn’t have to declare consoles over. The market did. Yes, Steam is the big winner, but Sony isn’t gaining customers either; perhaps even losing them on consoles.
I prefer facts to gut feelings.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/nearly-5-years-in-ps5-sales-remain-neck-and-neck-with-ps4/
Me too. That’s a fact, but it doesn’t refute what I said. It’s a rosy picture that sounds like it refutes what I said, which is why Sony reports it that way, but it doesn’t. 124 million users includes PS4. What the article even mentions in the headline is that it’s behind PS4 at the same point in its life, even with the absence of a real competitor this time around in Xbox. Does it sound healthy to you that 5 years into a console generation, Sony can’t convince people to move to PS5 when all they play is Minecraft or Fortnite?
EDIT: Btw, Sony categorizes monthly actives as “an estimated total number of unique accounts that played games or used services on the PlayStation Network during the last month of the quarter and is based on company research, and may be updated in the future”, emphasis mine. My PS4 only streams video these days, and it sure sounds like it’s counted in that same metric.
… I get that this is a REALLY important topic to you - but the article also explains how the PS5 is much more expensive (inflation adjusted) at this point in time compared to the PS4. That’s very much part of “doing well”.
Also, that the PS4 numbers are included is no different from the PS3 before - and your claim was that Sony was losing customers at that.
Take the L.
I said perhaps, because our data is always lagging behind real time by a few months, and the difference between the two generations’ units sold is close enough that the gap could have been covered in the time it takes to report on it. We don’t know that it has, but it’s possible. Increased spending on exclusives, and fewer of them, has led to decreased margins on them, and the bulk of PlayStation’s revenue is coming from third parties that are available everywhere while PlayStation’s own games are going multiplatform as well, a thing that they never used to do. There’s no L for me to take here.
Asus and Microsoft are by no means excluded from the game. Their ROG is excellent: powerful yet battery-efficient.
It’s a shame because the Series X is an absolutely superb device. The fast storage, quick resume, performance, noise level etc are all incredible, and the backwards compatibility, console streaming, and appeal of game pass make the Series X a wonderful gaming machine. I couldn’t be happier with it.
We all know the reasons why it isn’t as successful as the PS5, but the Series X as a price-to-value product has been woefully under-appreciated.
We definitely play on the XSX as a family a lot more than the PS5 that’s collecting dust upstairs. Its smaller form factor makes it much easier to use as a gaming console in our main living area. But yeah, GamePass is a crazy good deal if you know how to use the conversion trick (buy GamePass core for like 2 years for $80-100 from key reseller, then convert it to Ultimate on MS site at a 2:3 ratio or whatever).
That being said, everyone knows GamePass isn’t sustainable long-term. Microsoft truly is killing their gaming division with such short-sighted planning.
I don’t think everyone does know that. There’s a very real, perhaps likely, chance that Game Pass is sustainable.
Rather, it isn’t sustainable at its current pricing model. It takes the average studio team 3-5 years to make 1 AAA game.
Microsoft’s internal studios (excluding the ones they just bought over the last 4-5 years) have made Halo Infinite and… Hmm… Is the Forza studio considered OG first-party? I’ll just lump them in as well, since they’ve been associated with MS for awhile. So 2 major games in the last ~8 years. Then you have the major studios they just bought: Bethesda and Blizzard/Activision. Bethesda has released 2 major AAA games in the last 5 years while under MS ownership (I think Doom Eternal came out before the purchase). Blizzard has done 1 and Activision has done 1 CoD game.
So MS paid $7.5b for Zenimax/Bethesda and $68.7b for Blizz/Activision, for a whopping total of $76.2b. Starfield sold around 3m copies, Diablo 4 has generated around $1b in revenue since release (chose revenue since it’s a live service game and that includes copies sold), and Black Ops 6 has sold… I’m not sure, a quick search doesn’t show any hard numbers, just Xbox propaganda that it “was the biggest release in franchise history.” (I say propaganda bc many of their larger shareholders weren’t super pleased with how much it cost to purchase Activision, so of course they wanted to spin it as being a smart investment).
And it costs MS a lot of money to license some of the bigger games to come to GamePass.
I just don’t see it being sustainable without cost increases. And if the cost goes up, they’ll turn off customers. And we’ve already seen that their cheaper, indie studios aren’t safe from being axed despite releasing successful hits.
Their current pricing model is between $10 and $20 per month for somewhere north of 30M subscribers. The ability to get Game Pass for less than that was largely discontinued two years ago. You can conservatively estimate that to be $300M in revenue every month. Every two months, they can fund a Call of Duty game. Every month, they can more than fund one Starfield. That’s only Game Pass revenue without including game sales. I’ll also remind you that Microsoft publishes 6 of the top 10 PlayStation games last month; they’re still selling lots of games outside of Game Pass. “Excluding the [studios] they bought over the last 4-5 years” is a major omission. Their licensing deals for third parties on Game Pass have seen significantly less investment in the past few years; as their first party library increases, they’re less and less necessary. I’m also curious where you got that number for Starfield units sold, because my back of the napkin math puts it at more than 3M copies on Steam alone.
Minecraft also seems to get frequently forgotten about when talking about Microsoft gaming too. It makes Microsoft around £300m per year in games sales. That’s just the game. Imagine what the merchandise figures are on top of that.
I don’t think game pass is anywhere near unsustainable, when we consider what is actually sustaining it.
Same here. Got it on launch day, and have been very happy with it. It’s a fantastic console.
Xbox kills game studios
I’ve been gaming primarily on Xbox since the 360. After Microsoft bought and closed Tango though? I literally vowed to never buy another Xbox product again. I can’t even remember the last time I booted my Series X
Every major publishers kills games studios
Yep, bastards.
https://www.polygon.com/analysis/610779/microsoft-layoffs-perfect-dark-everwild-mismanagement/
I can’t understand the nonsensical generational naming scheme on XBox so I just avoid getting one because I don’t want to get a previous generation. And my scattered brain keeps forgetting the info I look up because it’s inconsequential to actual living in these wild times.
Also the UI looks like total ass with ads all over it.
It particularly enrages me since the xbox 360 had a wonderful interface in my opinion.
It only had a nice and responsive UI at the start of the generation. It was a slow, sloppy, ad-riddled mess at the end.
Agreed, I guess I meant it potentially had a great interface, I have memories (I SWEAR they are real -I scream into the void) that the xbox 360 had a really slick interface at one point with very clear effective panels/tabs that was progressively enshittified… but if it hadn’t… it would have been nice.
That was a different timeline, if such a one where microsoft didn’t enshittify xbox exists.
OG Xbox was great. PS3 was great. Even PSP. Nintendo switch was so-so. Didn’t like the other Xbox ones
How much you want to bet that game pass goes up to $30 a month in the next 3 months?
Instead of enticing people to buy, they will milk their current customer base to make a few extra bucks short term.
With the “everything is an Xbox” mantra, there’s no reason to have a capable PC and an Xbox anymore. I don’t mind waiting for PS games on my PC either, leaving only Nintendo still having some appeal.
deleted by creator
Unfortunately Nintendo adults will soy out and apend a bajillion dollars on anything Nintendo does at this point so long as it has pokemon or zelda on it.
Consoles wars are stupid, exclusives are stupid.
Important thing to remember about the “console wars.”
Other than the Nintendo Wii (iirc), most consoles sell at a loss at the beginning of the generation. They eventually turn a profit on console sales, but console sales aren’t the point.
Game sales are.
When each console was its own very specific architecture and games needed to be designed specifically for them, console sales matter a lot because that’s how you’d sell games.
But now that architectures are similar (if not the same), cross-compilation has become easier than ever. It’s why you see Sony finally releasing first party titles on PC.
Microsoft knows full well that their console sales aren’t great, but that’s okay for them. Their PC sales are. Many of their titles sell on Steam. And they sell some of their titles on PlayStation.
They’ll continue to make some form of console because without it they lose out on millions of Game Pass subscriptions from people who don’t want to make the initial investment in a gaming PC, or deal with the complexity, but their goal of making that next console more and more like a PC fits perfectly in their model.
It’s a shame the Series X has sold so poorly, it’s a great console, but I doubt Microsoft is too worried about “losing” the console wars to Sony. The game has changed.
With a used Series S for 100 bucks and Gamepass over VPN from India for 3 per month, i couldnt be happier with my Xbox.
The one thing Xbox has had going for it for a while now is actual usage. There were metrics out there that even with the smaller player base, users engaged with and had more playtime than PS. This was true well into the current gen.
They didn’t bring new techno as they did previously with kinetic, pricing was indecent, the hub is such a mess : it looks like Amazon not like a GUI for gaming. It’s not surprising if they are loosing customers
I’m still waiting on a reason to upgrade from my Xbox One X.
SSDs - they are very nice. Series S is very affordable too if you aren’t a disc gamer
Disc only for me as the digital pricing on the MS store is rubbish compared to second hand discs.
Me too. I don’t regret the Series X either, the SSD is great for online loading times and play
They’ve also sold less than half the number of XBox One units compared to PS4, and like a third compared to the Switch, so they’ve been lagging behind for a while.
These days they don’t really seem to focus on console gaming at all. I’m curious to see if we’ll even get a traditional “next gen” console. It might just be a console UI for Windows PCs instead, with some third-party produced “console”-PCs.