30 September 2023 , 06:00
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Phil Spencer’s internal email leak shows Xbox’s insistence to buy up pieces of the gaming industry, rather than meaningfully add to it.
What a month Phil Spencer must be having. Just when we thought the dust on the Microsoft Activision deal had finally settled, leaked files to the FTC have spilled the beans about where Xbox sees its place in the industry. And I’ll be honest, it’s worse than I imagined – although not especially surprising. Already we’ve seen the platform-holder’s insistence on strong-arming its way back to relevance, first by buying Bethesda in 2020 and then, most recently, Activision Blizzard for almost $70 billion. The FTC leak last week has since revealed another target acquisition: Nintendo.
“It’s just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware,” reads Phil Spencer’s internal email, which dates back to 2020. In all fairness, this was sent a few months prior to the Xbox Series X|S launch, where hopes among Xbox’s leadership team were likely high that it could capture a bigger portion of players’ mindshare with its incoming next-gen console. However, the idea that Spencer and co. believed that Nintendo would be ripe for purchase in the near future smacks of entitlement – and dare I say delusion.
There was a time when Nintendo was on the ropes, sure. The Wii U only ever sold 13 million units worldwide – a drastic drop off compared the sales of its predecessor, the Nintendo Wii, which managed to crack 100 million. By comparison, the Nintendo Switch has already beaten that by quite some distance during its six years on the market according to its own data, selling in excess of 129 million units the last time numbers were reported. Simply put, the Nintendo Switch has been a runaway hit with players, and far more of a success than either the Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S. Which begs the question: in what world would Xbox buying Nintendo make sense, let alone be to the latter’s benefit?
Switch tactics
Obviously, video games are a business just as much as they are art, so I’ll never throw shade at a platform or publisher for wanting to grow; people need to be paid, after all. This still doesn’t discount how disheartening it is to see Xbox think that its only route to executing on this strategy is consolidation. The industry needs competition. It thrives off of it. Rivals Nintendo and PlayStation benefit greatly from having Xbox as a third major player, and everyone suffers each time the gaming world gets smaller. If Microsoft’s Activision and Bethesda purchases moved the needle for Xbox in the short term, maybe I could understand. Yet so far there’s been very little evidence of this.
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I’m of the firm belief that the success of a console lives or dies on the quality of the exclusive titles available to play on it. That’s the main differentiator that influences people when the time comes to choose either a PS5, Nintendo Switch, or Xbox Series X|S. This is where Xbox has been lacking so far this generation – to the extent that had Microsoft not purchased Bethesda, its 2023 first-party release calendar would have been barren. Sadly, in the attempt to plug the hole Phil Spencer knew was coming, Xbox players were forced to make do with Redfall and Starfield.
Redfall was a technical mess at launch and is still yet to receive its promised 60fps patch on Xbox consoles. Starfield, meanwhile, is a fine enough Bethesda RPG, but I would argue that it fails to live up to the hype that Xbox fostered around it. Elsewhere, on other platforms, you have the likes of God of War Ragnarok and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart serving as visual and gameplay marvels on PS5, while Nintendo continues to knock it out of the park with Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Odyssey and other first-party titles continuing to dazzle.
I refuse to believe that Nintendo’s output would in any way be improved if Xbox bought it. The Nintendo Switch is doing just fine on its own, and the sales numbers speak for themselves – and that's in an industry where the power of hardware is touted as the defining factor in how good it is. Xbox has done the opposite, chasing power with the Xbox Series X, yet constantly failing to deliver on the graphical and technical opportunities it unlocks by releasing subpar first-party games that are either lacking modes at launch, or refusing to hit the 60fps standard a lot of us have come to expect for most modern AAA releases.
Back in the day Xbox – during the Xbox 360 era, specifically – made big strides that benefitted all players, be it Xbox Live, achievements or indie support. Of late, however, it’s one big bet on Xbox Game Pass, which remains a loss-leader that I believe over time is contributing the to devaluation of video games across all platforms. Then there’s its play for accessibility, which is great in terms of widening the potential game-playing audience, but feels a bit useless when Xbox is doing a bad job of releasing exclusives to actually play.
If I was Phil Sencer, rather than looking around to see what publisher to buy up next, I’d go back to basics and build trust back up with players by focusing on the one thing that truly matters: games. Nintendo coming under the ownership of Xbox would only benefit one party: Xbox. Not the industry, not third-party publishers and certainly not us players.