It took just a day for some clear patterns to emerge in the Xbox Player Voice feedback forum, with the clear-cut leading request being bringing back Xbox console exclusives. A player named Carlos Hernandez shared a request to bring them back, claiming that Xbox isn’t selling enough consoles because there’s no reason to buy them when the games can be bought and played on competing systems. Within a day, that request has received nearly 10,000 upvotes, and over a thousand comments.
I could have worded that more clearly. I’m not saying consoles are themselves profitable, but that shipping consoles is the first step in building the captive audience that buys the games, accessories, live services, etc. that make consoles profitable. That vendor lock-in allows console makers to then milk buyers for the entire lifetime of the console.
If consoles were more like PCs i.e. anyone could play any game from any studio that cared to publish for the platform, console makers would have to focus on making their hardware stand out on its own. Which is particularly funny because, at least back when I was buying console gear (xbox 360 / beginning of the xbone was about the era I fell away from consoles) Microsoft was actually making really good peripherals. I still have my 360 controllers and I break them out for PC games whenever I have a bunch of people in the same room. they’re nice to use.
Instead, we get profit-maximizing tactics like taking a game that people want and putting it behind a several-hundred-dollar paywall, forcing people to either pony up for another 99% redundant console, or not playing the fun game everyone else has. No judgement to those who choose the latter, I bought the original xbox because Halo looked fun and my friends were playing it and guess what? It is a really fun game. I still play it from time to time. I just like it a lot better now that I don’t have to buy another expensive hunk of proprietary hardware.