Microsoft’s big Xbox announcement last week turned out to be something of an anticlimax: only four games, none particularly earth-shattering, will make their way to PlayStation or Nintendo Switch in the near future. (Annoyingly, Microsoft executives declined to name them, but it was later reported by Famitsu and the Verge that the games in question are Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Pentiment, and Hi-Fi Rush, which matches what I got from I’ve heard from other sources.)
Microsoft is not leaving the console market and taking all its games multiplatform, as hyped rumor mongers had wildly speculated. And the (excellent value) Xbox Game Pass subscription service remains exclusive to Xbox and PC.
This is basically non-news. Microsoft was already one of the biggest publishers on PlayStation, especially now that it owns both Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard: everything from Skyrim to Call of Duty to Minecraft is technically a Microsoft game. If Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer had announced that Starfield would be coming to the PlayStation 5 last year, for example, or Xbox head Sarah Bond had said that Microsoft was abandoning the idea of Xbox exclusives altogether, that would have been a huge change . worth writing home about (or, in my case, writing about you). Instead, this is a small extension of a strategy Microsoft has been pursuing for years. Every time I’ve talked to a Microsoft executive for years, they’ve obediently marketed some variation on the “play the games you want, with the people you want, wherever you want” line, which has different surfaced on last week’s Xbox. broadcast.
What this announcement did instead is highlight how toxic and outdated the idea of the console wars is. Growing adults are still so overinvested in the idea of a console as an identity that the mere prospect of Microsoft releasing some of the products it has spent billions developing or purchasing on other, significantly more popular gaming consoles is enough was to provoke tantrums and emotional reactions. outpourings. The Xbox community has been in a mess over this for weeks, with people on X posting war memes and YouTubers throwing up videos with titles like “Xbox… IT’S OVER!”.
Some of this outrage is undoubtedly intended to increase clicks, but most of it is misdirected passion. Fans care a lot about the Xbox and the games the studios have brought us over the years, but it doesn’t really matter which machine a video game is played on, whether it’s a Steam Deck or a Switch, an Xbox or a PlayStation is. . Microsoft executives have been saying this for years, and anyone who hasn’t heard hasn’t been listening.
The console wars have never been anything more than a marketing ploy. There have been times over the years when this has been quite entertaining, such as when Sega versus Nintendo produced one of the great business rivalries of the 1990s (remember the slogan “Sega does what Nintendo doesn’t?”) and when Microsoft’s ongoing fumbling with the The announcement of Xbox One in 2013 gave Sony plenty of opportunities for playful piss-takes.
But now that culture wars have turned every facet of modern life, from politics to parkrun, into a hostile nightmare, it’s just not fun anymore. It’s ridiculous to see people arguing over video game consoles like it’s a matter of life and death.
But even if the topic we argue about doesn’t matter, the way we argue about it does. Toxic fandom is a problem everywhere from football to video games to Star Wars, and its loud, illogical and mean-spirited nature has reflected the tenor of public discourse since 2016. Bad actors have tried to weaponize video game fandom before and fueled its anger goals that match their goals, and they will try again.
Bringing it back to Xbox, for me the problematic thing about Microsoft’s presence in the gaming world is simply that it’s a mega-company focused on continued growth. Unlike Sony and Nintendo, the country has virtually unlimited resources, as evidenced by its recent greed. The company is still working to reverse a history of acquiring great studios and then squashing them through corporate interference. I distrust any company that has the power to buy out the competition in a creative industry where competition is the key to the variety, innovation and creative value of its products. Microsoft is starting to port Xbox games to competing consoles and is actually suggesting that it is not determined to monopolize this space, and that more players can benefit from the fruits of the many studios’ efforts. This is reassuring.
So this isn’t the end of Xbox consoles, but let’s use this as an opportunity to call for an end to the manufactured console wars. They really make us all look bad.
What to play
You can tell Pacific drive is inspired by the strange fiction of Jeff VanderMeer, because playing it is like driving a beat-up car into Annihilation’s exclusion zone. Strange and terrible things await you inside, under an eerily colored, thunderous sky, and your chaotic vehicle is all that stands between you and them. You drive into the Zone again and again, never quite knowing what you will see, fixing your car in the garage with what you find and trying to investigate more and more what is going on.
It’s all pretty peaceful until suddenly it isn’t and you’re fleeing a storm while fiddling with manually turning your lights and wipers on and off.
Available on: PC, PS5
Estimated playing time: Not sure yet …
What to read
-
If you’ve ever idly perused the PlayStation Store, you may have noticed the Pet the animals games – basic eyebrow raising games where you press a button to pet an animal (i.e. a jpeg of an animal) for a few minutes to get an easy trophy. When Ellie Gibson started looking for what these games were about, she discovered an unexpected story.
-
Peripheral equipment manufacturer PDP comes with a new guitar-shaped controller for use with Fornite’s Festival music game component (and Rock Band 4, for anyone who still plays that). Fun fact: Fortnite Festival was developed by Harmonix, the developer behind the original Guitar Hero and Rock Band games.
-
If you can make it to Asda, you might be able to pick up a copy of last year’s ill-fated Wizard FPS Immortals of Aveum on PS5 for a pound. It’s not a bad game, but it came out during the busiest gaming year ever and unfortunately sank without a trace.
-
Embracer group, after going on a wild takeover spree financed by speculative Saudi money that suddenly vanished last year, has laid off 1,400 people, canceled 29 games and closed several of the studios it bought. The CEO then made the undoubtedly popular statement that layoffs are “something everyone has to get through.”
What to click
Skull and Bones review – yo ho ho and some fun
Have you ever wanted to play Mario Kart accompanied by a live jazz band? That is possible in Oklahoma
LGBTQ+ representation in video games lags behind film and TV, the report found
Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered Review – A great remaster of Lara Croft’s lost arc
Ask Block
A question from reader Paul this week:
“Which games would you go back and score again (if you could), because you were too hard on it at the time, or because you were too lenient?”
I mean, obviously I’m right the first time, every time, Paul. Except, uh, when I’m not. Most of my earliest critic blunders are happily hidden in the pages of magazines from a decade or two ago, but some remain public. Readers, may I humbly declare that I was wrong about Assassin’s Creed 3, which I should have been much harsher against. (I was stuck in a hotel room for a week playing it and I think I have Stockholm Syndrome.)
I was also wrong about Sunset Overdrive, which I thought was pretty rubbish, but which in retrospect is an interesting curiosity – although I maintain that the tone is just incredibly annoying.
Oh, and if I had to review Dark Souls, I would give it a 10. The version I played just wasn’t quite finished yet.
If you have a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – click ‘reply’ or send an email to pushbuttons@theguardian.com.