The Xbox brand is kind of melting down right now. Rumors and reports swirled across the internet in the last several weeks about many of their exclusive console games coming to Nintendo and Sony’s platforms. Prominent Xbox influencers started to bail out, feeling like a huge seismic shift was coming. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, responded to this mess with a vague “we hear you” statement, promising that a big update about the future of their business strategy is coming up next week.
Having lived through the Sega Dreamcast’s death in the early 2000’s, this feels very similar. Sega bailed on their neat little console when the money and the players just didn’t show up, and put all of their cool games onto other machines — ironically including the original Xbox. It took them a while, but they rebuilt themselves into an iconic publishing and development house that now has several hit franchises and even popular movies in their stable.
Microsoft’s gaming division is in a similar spot to that beleaguered version of Sega two decades ago — though Microsoft the company is a much larger and more robust thing than most other tech companies could ever hope to be. I thought that they would invest the capital to weather whatever storm Xbox went through in their brazen quest to build a hardware and…
