The raging days of console wars between PlayStation and Xbox are largely over. Sure, they will be resurrected a bit in the build-up to the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett, but the conflicts major battles are over. Thankfully, people don’t fight over which gaming console is the best anymore, or at least it’s not as common as it used to be. And according to Phil Spencer, this is a good thing, because the console wars mentality isn’t for him. According to the head of Xbox, the gaming industry is a growing industry with plenty of room for competition. Further, that the road to success in it isn’t built on the back of the failures of others or pulling down competitors to leapfrog over them.
“I would say the most competitive side of it…no,” said Spencer, when asked if the consoles wars-type competition some drum up has any actual impact on Microsoft’s approach to gaming by Fortune. “I’m always listening to the community, but the people who want to see others fail in order for the green team to succeed — that’s not me. There were people, when the Sony deal was announced, I could see it online saying ‘what are you doing helping them out?’”
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Spencer continued, noting that it’s been working with Sony for years.
“And it’s like, we’ve had years and years of a relationship with Sony. Sony shipped PCs and they had Windows on it; they use our development tools to build games. This idea that the only way for any of us to succeed is by pulling down someone else just isn’t the way that the industry works today. It just isn’t.”
Spencer also pointed out that its partnership with Sony doesn’t end there. In fact, Spencer points out that it’s one of the biggest third-party publishers on PlayStation thanks to Minecraft.
Now, if you know Spencer, you’ll know he’s been helping and working towards unifying the industry and gamers across platforms for awhile now, something that nobody was pushing for during the previous two console generations. And slowly but surely, it’s working. For example, thanks to Microsoft and Xbox pushing it so hard, console crossplay is slowly becoming a common thing in the industry.
That all said, Microsoft is increasingly pushing into software and services, and while PlayStation is following it there a bit, it’s not pushing into that space as hard or as quickly. In other words, I can easily imagine a future where PlayStation and Xbox are even less of competitors than they are right now.
