Microsoft’s Phil Spencer desires gamers to have extra choices past the first-party shops tied to consoles.
Spencer has at all times appeared eager on making a extra open and accessible digital setting for gamers and has usually mentioned decreasing platform fragmentation and offering clients with extra choices and management over the place they play or buy their video games.
Talking with Polygon at GDC 2024, Microsoft’s CEO of Gaming mentioned the thought of offering Xbox customers with further methods to buy titles by including third-party shops such because the Epic Video games Retailer, Itch.io, or GOG to the console as an alternative of forcing customers to purchase from the official Xbox storefront.
In accordance with Spencer, further shops on consoles would mirror PCs, the place there are a number of choices, which advantages not solely the shopper but in addition the console maker.
“[Consider] our historical past because the Home windows firm,” stated Spencer. “No one would blink twice if I stated, ‘Hey, whenever you’re utilizing a PC, you get to determine the kind of expertise you might have [by picking where to buy games]. There’s actual worth in that.”
Historically, console makers bought {hardware} at a loss, a technique often called a subsidy, hoping to make up the cash later by means of sport gross sales. However, with stagnant console gross sales and rising {hardware} prices, this technique is changing into much less efficient as a result of the worth of console elements isn’t declining as quickly as with earlier generations.
And, in contrast to the flourishing PC and handheld markets, the console market is experiencing little development. The newest figures from Circana (NPD) report that whereas whole spending was up 2%, {hardware} gross sales declined 30% year-over-year in February 2024 and a 19% decline year-to-date.
A part of this stems from PCs offering customers a alternative in the place they purchase video games, making subsidizing {hardware} “tougher in right now’s world,” Spencer stated. Plus, the shopper should not be restricted by which console they personal or the place they purchase their video games.
“And I’ll say, and this may increasingly appear too altruistic, I don’t know that [subsidizing is] rising the business,” stated Spencer. “So I believe, what are the boundaries? What are the issues that create friction in right now’s world for creators and gamers? And the way can we be a part of opening up that mannequin?
“If I need to play on a gaming PC, then I really feel like I’m extra a steady a part of a gaming ecosystem as an entire, versus [console], the place my gaming is sort of sharded – to make use of a gaming time period – primarily based on these completely different closed ecosystems that I’ve to play throughout.”
Briefly, Spencer believes a extra seamless gaming expertise could be doable if console and retailer boundaries did not exist.
