Some third-party publishers have reportedly expressed doubts about continuing to support Xbox consoles amid “flattening” sales in Europe.
Therefore GamesIndustry.biz boss Chris Dring said his speech at GDC last week was that he thought “Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer.”
“The other thing I’ve heard — I’ve heard this from a very famous company and a not-so-famous one — is that Xbox’s performance in Europe has been just flat,” he said.
“You can watch our monthly coverage of the gaming market and you see that Xbox sales are down and down over the last year and getting worse this year.
“A big company that released a big game last year said [was]’I don’t know why we bothered to support him.’
“We mentioned in the previous podcast that we had heard that retailers in Europe were reviewing or reducing their Xbox stock on their shelves – hardware, games, things like that, and now you have third-party publishers. , ‘To be honest with you, while the market for us is PC and PS5, we’re trying to make a Series S version and an X version of the game.’
Last year, Microsoft admitted it was “losing the console wars” after entering the market in 2001 with the original Xbox, which has consistently ranked third behind PlayStation and Nintendo in terms of sales.
According to data shared by Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two, the PS5 has outsold the Xbox Series X/S around 2-1 worldwide at the end of 2023.
In February, Microsoft released an Xbox business update confirming reports that it plans to bring more first-party games to the PlayStation and/or Switch in the form of Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded.
Xbox has also discussed releasing Gears of War, Microsoft Flight Simulator, the next Doom game, Starfield and Indiana Jones for rival consoles, boss Phil Spencer recently said. The Verge: “I don’t think we as an industry should ever rule out a game going to another platform.”
Dring continued: “And when Xbox puts some games on the PS5 – which I understand, most of them will come across at some point, assuming Xbox moves forward like they’re supposed to – I think Xbox is really in trouble as a game. hardware manufacturer and that was what came out of GDC for me.
He added: “I thought it would be good, but then some developers and publishers are like, ‘yeah, no, you know, does it make any sense?’ And then you can lose it.”