Some third-party publishers are reportedly expressing doubts about continuing to support Xbox consoles amid “flatlining” sales in Europe.
That’s according toGamesIndustry.bizhead Chris Dring, who said his takeaway fromGDClast week was that he thinks “Xboxis in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer”.
“The other thing I heard—I heard it from a very prominent company and one not so prominent—was Xbox’s performance in Europe is just flatlining”, he said.
“you’re able to follow our monthly coverage in the games market and you can see that Xbox sales are falling, and it’s been falling all throughout last year and it’s falling even harder this year.
“The phrase one major company who released a big game last year said [was], ‘I don’t know why we bothered supporting it’.
“We mentioned on a previous podcast that we’d heard retailers in Europe are considering or had already beencutting back their Xbox stock on their shelves—hardware, games, that kind of thing—and now you’ve got third-party publishers going, ‘we’re putting in a lot of effort trying to create a Series S version and an X version of a game when, to be honest with you, for us the market isPCandPS5’.”
Last year,Microsoft admitted to having “lost the console wars”after consistently ranking third behindPlayStationandNintendoin terms of sales since entering the market with the original Xbox in 2001.
PS5 had outsold Xbox Series X/S by around 2-to-1globally as of the end of 2023, according to data shared by Grand Theft Auto publisherTake-Two.
And in February,Microsoftdelivered an Xbox business update which confirmed reports that it’s planning to bring more first-party games to PlayStation and/orSwitch, in the form ofPentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves and Grounded.
Xbox has alsoreportedly weighed up the ideaof releasingGears of War, MicrosoftFlight Simulator, the next Doom game,Starfieldand Indiana Jones for rival consoles, and bossPhil Spencerrecently toldThe Verge: “I don’t think we should as an industry ever rule out a game going to any other platform.”
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Dring continued: “And with Xbox putting some of the games on PS5—from what I understand the majority of them will be coming across at some point, assuming it progresses as Xbox believes it probably will—I think Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer, and that was the thing that came out of GDC for me.”
He added: “I thought it would be fine, but then I didn’t really factor in that some developers and publishers might just go, ‘yeah I don’t, you know, is there any point?’ And that is when you can lose it.”
