Next gen won’t be about hardware, it’ll be about Game Pass
When PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launched in 2013, the nature of console launches and the new generation they herald in, changed. The arms race became less about the hardware and much more about the software.
A year out from the launch of PS5 and Project Scarlett that hasn’t changed. Barring some incredible, unforeseen technological breakthrough, the two black boxes Sony and Microsoft produce will be practically indistinguishable. Consoles have only ever been good as the games they run. The games they run at launch are just more important than ever.
Six years ago, Microsoft’s undoing was to make the Xbox One with ambitions of it being an all-in-one entertainment device. The actual hardware was there, but how it was used and what the Xbox brand wanted to be clashed catastrophically with what players wanted.
Xbox One has not been a failure — regular sales data isn’t available but as of January 2019 it had sold in excess of 40 million units according to an industry analyst — but its sales have been dwarfed by Sony’s console.
PlayStation 4 came out on top initially because the perception was Sony had made the “purer” video game machine. Its continued success came with a stellar line-up of exclusive games that positioned Sony’s first party studios as the HBO of games.
Over the years however, the key components of PlayStation’s success have started to wane slightly. The exclusives aren’t quite firing on all cylinders like they were a year or two ago (this year’s high-profile releases being Days Gone and Death Stranding) and PlayStation Plus, which was once essential thanks to the bounty of free games that came monthly with a subscription, doesn’t have that same pulling power.
Not that Sony is doing badly as the generation nears its end. PS4 is the fourth best-selling console ever after all, having sold more than 100 million consoles. There’s work to be done though, and that’s been made clear by Microsoft as its next gen plans gather pace. Which leads me to Game Pass.
Xbox’s subscription service, which offers access to a library of 250+ games including all its Xbox One exclusives, is central to its future plans. Since Phil Spencer swept in to lead the Xbox team following the disastrous Xbox One launch, he has led efforts to rebuild the brand and set Xbox up for a brighter future.
Like Nintendo, which pooled its resources into the incredibly successful Switch when it became apparent Wii U’s fortunes couldn’t be salvaged, over the past few years Xbox has been building towards Project Scarlett.
First came backwards compatibility. This much requested feature was introduced in 2015 and ended up adding support for more than 600 original Xbox and Xbox 360 titles. Many more than anybody expected when it was announced. Crucially, this support means all those games, as well as all Xbox One games, will be playable on the next Xbox too.
Sony never added backwards compatibility to PS4, but it came as no surprise earlier this year when they started talking PS5 and confirmed the console will be backwards compatible with PS4 titles.
Game Pass followed backwards compatibility as another key component for Xbox, slowly building its library with new and old games to the point that it quickly represented great value. Microsoft then started acquiring a string of studios — Ninja Theory, Obsidian and Double Fine among them. Bringing them into their first-party lineup, this was a play to strengthen their future offering of exclusives for Scarlett, but for Game Pass as well.
More recently we’ve been seeing the potential of Xbox’s streaming service Project xCloud too. Currently in preview, xCloud allows users to stream Xbox games from the cloud to mobile devices over a Wi-Fi or mobile connection.
At XO19 it was announced that xCloud support will be included with Game Pass next year. Unexpectedly, it was also announced that xCloud will support Sony’s DualShock 4 controllers as well — and if that’s not a sign of the old 360-era Xbox swagger, I don’t know what is.
In addition to all this, Xbox launched Game Pass on PC earlier this year, then announced Game Pass Ultimate, which rolls its Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass subscriptions into a single monthly cost.
With 12 months to go (we assume) Xbox’s grand plan is pulling into focus. As the launch of its next console approaches its becoming clearer that the box itself won’t be nearly as important as the services available with it, or indeed without it.
It’s easy to imagination that as Scarlett approaches and Xbox makes its big play for a new audience these services will consolidate fully. Game Pass Ultimate — currently available for £10.99 a month — will surely become the standard. Words like “Gold”, “Game Pass” and “Ultimate” may well be dropped too as it becomes a single, all-encompassing subscription.
While Xbox has been building all this up, Sony has quietly been playing catch-up. Quietly, because while Microsoft has been establishing all this Sony has been selling a steady stream of PS4s and basking in the critical response to first-party games like God of War and Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Sony hasn’t had to play catch-up with any urgently, but it soon will.
Sony has announced backwards compatibility for PS5, but PlayStation Now, its own subscription service, is well behind Game Pass. With its comparably feeble library, Now isn’t currently able to go toe-to-toe, despite the expensive ad campaign.
None of this is to say Sony won’t put together a great package for PS5, but the impetus is on them to offer something much closer to what Xbox has. Sony will likely still be producing top-tier exclusives of course, and will have 100 million PS4 users to potentially convert, but gaming is trending towards streaming and subscription services and it’s clear which company is leading the way.
It’s not a question of whether Sony will start pouring money into Now, but when. And when it does the real fun begins, as Sony and Microsoft compete for games to put on each service.
It could get nasty.
