Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden says Xbox’s current issues have mostly been down to the publisher’s inability to pick a lane and stay in it.
Whether you’re an Xbox diehard or not, there’s no denying that Microsoft has been pretty confusing over the last few years, with the company seemingly changing its strategy on a whim constantly – which really hasn’t helped it catch up on PlayStation’s massive lead. Most prominently has been the company’s approach to game exclusivity since it purchased Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, where for a bit there every Xbox game was also coming to PS5, and then sometime this year it decided, ‘actually, no we’re doing exclusives again’… at least for some games.
Speaking to The Expansion Pass (below), Layden – the former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment America – notes, “I think Microsoft never really picked a lane. Or if they picked a lane, they didn’t stay in it very long.” He notes the aforementioned flip flopping between being a publisher on all platforms vs wanting to be an exclusive platform, saying, “a platform needs exclusives or the platform has no meaning,” but “if you’re the biggest publisher in the world, you almost have to be on every platform, because that’s how the business model works. You can’t be successful at both.”
There’s also the Xbox Game Pass issue, wherein Microsoft is inherently devaluing its big titles by offering them as part of a subscription service on day one. Layden says, “If you’re going to do that, then are you expecting people are going to buy content if they can get it on a subscription service”.
He notes “the math doesn’t” work with trying to be everything at once with Game Pass, adding, “if you’re sitting on a big bunch of Microsoft money perhaps you don’t feel that tension until, you know, slowly slowly slowly and then all at once where it becomes very hard to ignore. And I think they’ve got themselves in a pickle, to be honest.”
Layden says new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma “is doing her best to try to right the ship”, adding, “I hope she does it. Though I don’t know what that looks like.”