Xbox is a third party publisher and not a console maker any more

A reader is unimpressed by Microsoft’s new ‘This is an Xbox’ marketing campaign and insists that Xbox has already gone third party.

As a company, Microsoft is worth over $3 trillion and yet for some reason they have always had terrible marketing. Maybe they’re so rich because they don’t like spending money, including on talented staff, but that seems bizarre to me. So if you’re wondering why Xbox always has such bad marketing (if it has any at all) it’s not actually specific to them, it’s the whole company.

I say this, you’ve probably already guessed, because this latest marketing campaign for ‘This is an Xbox’ is just mindboggling bad. It blows past ‘I could do better than this’ and right through to ‘Anyone could have done better this,’ to the point where you begin to wonder whether Sony paid for the ads and Xbox doesn’t actually realise they’ve gone up everywhere.

The gist is, if you haven’t seen them (I assume GC will put some pics up here), that they’re showing off that you don’t need to own an Xbox console in order to play Xbox games, as you can use a PC, mobile device, or a smart TV. This is despite the fact that the Xbox cloud streaming service is still only in beta and, in my experience, is not very good – certainly not as good as GeForce Now.

There’s no need to ask why they’re advertising all this right now because the answer is obvious: because Xbox console sales are in the toilet and it’s the only thing they can do. Except they’re doing it really badly. I mean, the main poster is a picture of a TV, with dotted lines around it and the phrase ‘This is also an Xbox, by itself.’ That’s a hilariously clumsy sentence that only highlights how weird and confusing the whole campaign is.

But beyond just the bad taglines the whole thing doesn’t make any sense. Nobody’s going to see these ads and suddenly sign up to Game Pass (and buy a controller) for their smart TV. Most casual and non-gamers aren’t going to have a clue what the adverts are even on about, especially as they don’t include any obvious mention of Game Pass.

If you do know what it means though the message is clear: you don’t need to buy an Xbox console, you can just play the same games on other devices and save your £500. If you really know your stuff, you’ll also realise that this includes PlayStation 5 (I’m fascinated to see if ads for Indiana Jones And The Great Circle will include mention of it also coming to PlayStation).

This all happened this week, at the same time that Xbox insisted it was making a next gen console and a handheld (I’m still not clear if they’re one and the same thing), while saying there’s no redlines about what games can be multiformat, i.e. Halo and Gears Of War can come to PlayStation 5.

I doubt Microsoft is outright lying about making new consoles, but I also doubt that their new consoles will be anything more than a sideshow. A collector’s edition for hardcore fans but not something that most people will ever know about, let alone buy.

Microsoft isn’t going to spell out what’s going on here, because it makes them look bad, but it’s obvious: they are, to all intents and purposes, a third party publisher now. They’re basically just Activision Blizzard, with Bethesda and their other studios glued on the side. Sure, they might continue to sell consoles but only as an afterthought and absolutely not because that’s where they make their money, in terms of hardware or software sales.

Xbox is one step up from Sega at the moment, in terms of selling hardware, and I’m sure they’ll soon be the same, with new Xbox consoles treated like Sega mini-consoles and promotional items. Microsoft isn’t going third party, they already are.

In terms of battling PlayStation they failed, fair and square. They had four attempts and never made it, and the last two times were barely competitors. I don’t say that with any particular glee, just as an attempt to cut through the waffle and misdirection that Microsoft keeps throwing up.

In fact, I’d go further and say that they may still win against PlayStation, eventually. Not as a console manufacturer but when consoles are no longer necessary and everything runs on streaming. When that happens then they’ll be a contender again… although I bet their marketing is still awful.

By reader Logan3