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Comment by supermatt | Hacker News Reader

Feels like sony + ms are just going to shoot each other in the foot. Gamers will end up with both consoles (sold as loss leaders) to get access to the exclusives and then spread their investment in games between the two. Lose/lose

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Microsoft has said that they don't see Sony and Nintendo as competition and the acquisitions are not about Sony. (but about Google, Amazon, Apple etc)

Phil Spencer also said he hopes Sony and Nintendo will preserve the gaming ecosystem unlike those others.

The way Phil Spencer has been talking, it seems to me like they're going to start putting all these acquisitions exclusively on the Xbox, so I'm not sure sure about that "don't see them as competition" or "hope to preserve the gaming ecosystem".

> Microsoft has said that they don't see Sony and Nintendo as competition

They all say this and … that’s just marketing/bs. How in the world aren’t they competing ? They are all battling for a limited ressource which is your video game budget.

In the case of Nintendo, they've agreed to support cross-play, which Sony refuse to. And their consoles and brand are very different from XBox. Very few people are buying a Switch instead of an XBox or gaming PC; they're more likely to be buying it as another way of gaming.

i believe for MS, its all about the Xbox game pass. they need as many games under game pass as possible in order to lure people in to justify paying monthly for game as service.

Decent chance I won’t have to change my setup from PC/PS5/Switch for a good long while. When I last looked, whatever we’re calling the Xbox line now doesn’t have enough exclusives to personally justify any amount of investment in the console given my arrangement and that looks unlikely to change anytime in the near future.

It seems like all new Xbox games will be on PC[0], and eventually Playstation games will be after some exclusivity period[1].

Halo Infinite released same day on Xbox and PC. That's never happened for a mainline Halo game before.

[0] Phil Spencer confirms all first-party Xbox Series X games are 'coming to PC' https://www.pcgamer.com/phil-spencer-confirms-all-first-part...

[1] Sony wants to bring more first-party games to PC https://www.pcgamer.com/sonys-new-strategy-brings-more-of-it...

They both win if players have and keep both subscriptions simultaneously

Yep, this feels to me like the direction this is going. Sony and Microsoft scooping up game developers to make their subscription worth it for the number of games relative to the cost/month. And I think they've probably both gotten there now. Plenty of people maintain Netflix+Hulu+...+..., so I don't think its a stretch for people to put up $20/month and get both of the subscriptions even after the initial cost of the console.

That's actually not what they care about the most. Yes it's great to have players that will buy both consoles and both subscriptions. The companies don't worry about them as much because they already know it's a guaranteed segment of the market.

What they care about more are players that can ONLY buy one OR the other. That's higher on their priority list. This is about buying the mind shares of tomorrow.

Recurring online service payments are replacing game sales as the guaranteed loss recouping strategy for consoles. Exclusive titles will rely heavily on the online service, driving long-term subscriptions and anchoring cross-platform DLC purchases.

The loser is game devs, who must either (a) do extra dev AND pay higher fees to integrate deeply with each platform, or (b) integrate minimally with each platform and compete with titles that get a leg-up from users' sunk costs into the network service.

tl;dr - the online service is the new console

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