Microsoft‘s multiplatform strategy did not have a clear roadmap. First, it was on a case-by-case basis, then it was not the major releases, then it was everything. The flood gates that rumors have suggested would open finally did this year with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Forza Horizon 5 releasing across party lines to PlayStation, and Gears of War Reloaded set to do so later this year. It’s understandable, given how hardware began a slow decline, I would argue, right around the time Microsoft announced DRM for the Xbox One, something that backtracking couldn’t even help recover.
It’s hard to say just how much Xbox Game Pass, despite the company diving all in on it, has actually helped turn the tables, but given that Microsoft has begun coupling this with multiplatform releases, it’s fair to say that sales are still an important part of the equation. They are going to continue to be moving forward, and despite PlayStation being the ‘console leader’, the console war (if you even want to use that term) didn’t have a winner. What it did have was a changed landscape of acquisitions, increasing costs, and a drastically changed market. As much as the argument that Sony and the PlayStation are doing ok, they don’t need to follow suit; it seems sound; they honestly should.
A straight comparison of titles like, say, Forza Horizon 5 and Grand Turismo 7, for instance, doesn’t really offer and clear metric for who or what is performing better. Gran Turismo 7 hit 14.4 million copies sold, the highest in profit the series has ever seen. On the other hand, Forza Horizon 5 hit 40 million players by 2024, which is a pretty high number, but it’s hard to gauge if that was great for Game Pass sales, when turning the profit towards users rather than sales, you end up with companies promoting numbers that are less easy to quantify. On Steam, it sold an estimated 6.2 million units, which is a very good number, with the newly released PlayStation version hitting 1.4 million just recently. Turns out, people just want to play good games, not fight about whose plastic box is better.
Why Gran Turismo 7, of all the games on PlayStation, hasn’t gone to PC, of all places, is crazy to me. I understand Bloodborne is From Software, so everybody obsesses over it, but 3 years out, and the first-party racing game hasn’t been ported to the platform where die-hard racing game fans with $500 wheel setups and $1000 computers designed for ray-tracing and path-tracing exist in droves feels like a massive waste of an opportunity. All of this is happening after Nixxes was acquired by Sony, seemingly to do exactly this, port their first-party games to PC. It’s hard to say with certainty we could expect the game to sell to those degrees on Xbox, of all the metrics we do know, Forza Horizon saw its best launches on Game Pass, which could suggest that when people were trying rather than getting invested in it. This said, racing games, similar to fighting games, live and die by their active community, and since Gran Turismo 7 was once put on blast for its real money purchases, the quantity of sales might not even matter. Bringing in any new players could give the game new life in the mainstream.
Spider-Man 2 has also seen over 11 million sales as of last year. One could and should argue that it is a great number to hit, especially given the cost, which was suggested to be 250 million, but it’s not like Spider-Man wouldn’t be popular on Xbox. He is a well-liked character, and the series received large amounts of praise. Especially when high-quality games are starting to cost that much, looking beyond your ecosystem becomes a necessity. This is especially true when looking at Microsoft’s ability to make a $69 million acquisition like they did with Activision Blizzard. Sony has done well with their second-party strategy, but their acquisition of Bungie at $3.7 billion seemed to be much of a stretch for them. To be clear here, I’m not arguing for the model of every studio buying every studio, I’m not a fan of that either, but additional profit lines could lead to the stability Sony has struggled to project.
Thankfully, Sony does seem to be keeping its word about Bungie developing across party lines, as the studio has Marathon releasing later this year. I have heard mixed things about the beta that was recently available (coupled with Arc Raiders releasing around the same time), but I am hoping it finds some footing. A success here could signal more games to look at the wider gaming community earlier in their life cycle, rather than three years after, when it’s convenient. Who knows, Bloodborne might actually get that remaster when you’re looking at PC, Xbox, AND PlayStation players getting to enjoy a trip to Yharnam.
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