Some third-party publishers are reportedly expressing doubts about continuing to support Xbox consoles amid “flat” sales in Europe.
That depends GamesIndustry.biz Company president Chris Dring, who said his takeaway from last week's GDC was that he believes “Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer.”
“The other thing I've heard — I've heard it from a very prominent company and a not-so-prominent company — is that Xbox's performance in Europe has been flat,” he said.
“You can follow our monthly coverage of the gaming market and you can see that Xbox sales are declining, they were down all last year and they're down even more this year.
“This phrase was said by a major company that released a big game last year [was]“I don't know why we bothered to support her.”
“We mentioned in a previous podcast that we had heard that retailers in Europe were considering or were already reducing their Xbox inventory on their shelves — hardware, games, that kind of thing — and now you have third-party publishers moving in,” he said. “We're putting a lot of effort into trying to create “Series S version and X version of the game, to be honest with you, the market for us is PC and PS5.”
Last year, Microsoft admitted it had “lost the console wars” after consistently placing third behind PlayStation and Nintendo in terms of sales since entering the market with the original Xbox in 2001.
PS5 sales outsold Xbox Series
And in February, Microsoft provided an Xbox business update that confirmed reports that it plans to bring more first-party games to PlayStation and/or Switch, in the form of Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded.
Xbox has also reportedly considered the idea of releasing Gears of War, Microsoft Flight Simulator, the next Doom game, Starfield and Indiana Jones for rival consoles, president Phil Spencer recently told the edge: “I don't think we as an industry should ever rule out porting a game to any other platform.”
Dring continued: “And with Xbox putting some games on PS5 – from what I understand most of them will be coming at some point, assuming it progresses as Xbox thinks it's likely to – I think Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer, and that's the thing that It came out of GDC for me.
He added: “I thought it would be good, but then I didn't take into account the fact that some developers and publishers might say, 'Yeah, I don't know, you know, is there any benefit?'” And that's when you could lose it.
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