Summary
TheXbox Games Showcasemay have been the best of the hours of adverts beamed into our eyeballs this weekend, but it wasn’t perfect. I mean, in an ideal world we wouldn’t get so mindlessly excited about spending money anyway, we’d just play the games we love and then ruminate deeply on them in the vast, cavernous libraries where we write our criticism. But it is human to want, to covet, and to plant our flag in the ground for a team that does not care about us, only how much currency we have in our wallets.
Alongside the exciting game reveals –Doom: The Dark Ages,Fable,Dragon Age: The Veilguard,South of Midnight, too many to count –Xboxrevealed a brand new console: theXbox Series X digital edition. It follows in the footsteps of PlayStation’s similarly slimline console, and is terrible news for gamers the world over.
The Digital Console Is A Company Store
Xbox wants to get you into its ecosystem by any means possible. We’ve known for years that consoles are often sold at a loss because that money is made up by the vast profit margins of selling the games themselves. So if Xbox offers a low-cost console to get you hooked, more people will be able to buy those profitable games.
It seems that the digital-only Series X is an acknowledgement of the issues with the Series S. The lack of power means many developers have skipped over Xbox entirely this generation, due to the fact that Microsoft reportedly wants any game available on Xbox to be able to run on the lesser hardware as well as the big, black box.
I wonder if we’ll see the Xbox Series S discontinued before the generation is out.
However, I’m here to tell you that this low-price console is not the blessing you may think it is. Xbox isn’t the saviour of the poor, swooping in with angel wings to offer a games console to those who previously couldn’t afford it. It’s a corporation that wants your money, and a digital-only console gives it the monopoly on your wallet.
Digital-only consoles force you to buy digital games. Obviously. But this doesn’t just mean you lose out on any games that you paid full price for when they get delisted, which isn’t always the case with physical editions. This also means that you can only buy games from the Microsoft store. No more bargain bin gems. No more second-hand prices. No borrowing your mates’ games. You have to rely on Microsoft itself to have a sale if you want a cheap game.
The thing about real ecosystems is that they’re diverse. Matsutake mushrooms grow well with pine trees because they help each other. Two completely distinct species thrive because they work together. However, if you forcibly remove the myriad other plant species around the pines, the ecology suffers, and the mushrooms have more difficulty growing. I’ve drastically simplified a concept thatentire books have been written about, but you get the idea.
While things do grow in plantations, the ecology does not thrive. Seeds are sown to be reaped, and nothing more. Pesticides ward off natural bugs, which in turn turns their predators away. Other flora are considered weeds and are removed. Plantations are unnatural, entirely human in their existence for greed and profit. Flora doesn’t thrive in plantations, and neither do games.
Don’t Get Entangled
It’s easy to see a low-cost console as Microsoft removing a barrier to entry for gamers across the world, but it’s a cheap trick. you may already play Game Pass games on your phone via streaming, an underrated service in the Game Pass line-up. You can also stream games to cheap laptops, running through the entire Yakuza series on a computer that wheezes when it opens Chrome.
A digital-only console is a trap, a last gasp from Phil Spencer as he tries to boost the sales of Xbox’s underperforming service. When a company is happy to acquire countless enormous game studios only to lay off swathes of the workforce (thanks, Geoff, for finally mentioning that, by the way), it’s clearly being mismanaged.
For years, Xbox was a footnote on Microsoft’s expenses list, but now it’s spending billions of dollars on acquiring studios, it’s under a lot more scrutiny. The worst case scenario is that you invest in the Xbox plantation, only for Microsoft to pull the plug on the whole thing. Your games, unavailable. Your console, bricked. It seems hyperbolic but recent years of games being pulled from existence sets a precedent. At some point, it could happen to an entire ecosystem.
I don’t think this future is coming. I think Xbox’s suite of games for the next year looks strong, if anything. But it’s a possibility, and one you should protect yourself against. Avoiding digital-only consoles is the first step.
