Saying most on this forum want Xbox to succeed is blatantly wrong.
This isn't true. Most on this forum want XBox to be able to compete but disagree with Microsoft's approach to competitiveness.
People seem to misunderstand disagreement and light mocking / satire over those approaches as some wish for XBox to die and then suffer from a monopoly.
That would be a tiny, even if sometimes very vocal, minority. But I think the moderation team has been successful at sending away those
true trolls that wish for Xbox - or Playstation, or Nintendo - to wither and fade so their preferred platform turns into a monopoly (that inevitably uses their position to screw them over).
I want them to make more studios and expand smaller ones to make more games, quality titles that wouldn't exist otherwise, not to waste money buying studios just to lock and monopolize them, with no benefit to the gamers whatsoever. If monopoly is their strategy, I'll be glad to see they fail.
I think most people are simply seeing a good example in ony's approach of nurturing and growing first parties and IPs, and preceding almost all acquisitions with 2nd-party projects to make the expansion more organic. And they want Microsoft to do just that instead of just using the Office & Azure money to foreclose Playstation out of existing 3rd party IPs like they did with Bethesda.
Why did Halo Infinite fail so much? Why did Redfall fail so much? Why is Fable completely absent after being teased so many years ago? Why is Starfield being delayed so many times despite taking Playstation out of the equation?
But we can see the differences in approach developing in real time, for example with live service games.
Microsoft wanted to make Halo Infinite's multiplayer a live service game.
- They got 343i, which up to this point had only made single player and multiplayer coop games, to make a live service game out of no experience. The game was delayed a full year after the first gameplay trailer was received so poorly. The delay meant a very noticeable drought in Xbox's 1st party output. When it finally came out, the live service part of the game was terrible. It failed miserably.
Sony wanted to make The Last of Us 2's multiplayer (Factions 2) a live service game:
- They've been talking about it for years. We've been hearing about Sony buying small companies and hiring people with know-how on live service games for what, 5 years? Eventually Sony saw they still couldn't get the results they wanted so they made the most expensive acquisition in company's history, Bungie, despite giving them full publishing rights in the contract. And we still don't have a date for Factions 2. I'm not all that interested in TLoU after what they did with TLoU2 and I'm probably not going to play Factions 2 ever, but I have no doubt it'll be a great game because of how careful and dedicated Sony is being with it.
And despite Factions 2 being a no-show year after year, we're not really missing 1st party offers in the Playstation. And another curious thing we learned last week is that Sony cancels like a dozen games in pre-production every year. Their quality control during early development is great (if only they did as well on their PC ports...), but the actual truth is they only greenlight about 1 out of 6 projects in pre-production. This just means Sony's handling of their 1st parties isn't at all miraculous: they just fail fast, and spend truckloads of money on pre-production that serves no other purpose but from separating the good from the bad, or the good from the great.
Why wouldn't everyone wish for Microsoft to have a similar approach to their existing 1st party games?