Xbox is the queen of new IPs, but it lacks PlayStation-style exclusives

Xboxes is undoubtedly the queen of new intellectual properties: in 2022 it launched four against zero from Sony and Nintendo, but to the Microsoft console catalog yet PlayStation-style exclusives are missing: great narrative experiences in single player, capable of concretely moving sales and strongly characterizing a platform.

It is the Redmond house itself that admits it: recently the company declared in front of the antitrust authority that Sony has more exclusive games, many of which are of better quality: a situation that comes from afar, from the days of Mattrick management, but for which Xbox continues to pay the price despite the various acquisitions made so far.

Behold, the acquisitions: what have they brought back to the Xbox catalog so far? Psychonauts 2 and little else. There is Playground Games working on Fable but it will still take years to see it, Ninja Theory who announced Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 too early and is still on the high seas, to finally get to Starfield and Redfall which won’t arrive before next year.

We are also talking about titles that will hardly be able to compete on the same ground as the various The Last of Us, God of War, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man, Uncharted, Final Fantasy and Death Stranding, to mention only the Sony exclusives focused on a narrative-based single player system.

So let’s go back to the discussion of the new intellectual properties and the undoubted innovation value they bring to the catalog of Xbox Game Passthe latter service without which it would not have been possible to see the birth of certain projects, Pentiment in primis.

We have spent countless times extremely positive words towards the convenience of this digital platform, although its unscrupulous all-you-can-play approach has heavily influenced the perception of users with respect to the full price, which has thus become a luxury that only a few productions can afford to try. Credit to Microsoft, in short, which from this point of view is rendering a useful service to the gaming industry, allowing many users to discover games that otherwise they would not have bothered to look at. However, and it must be reiterated, filling the entire annual line-up with only independent content or small experiments will not allow Xbox to bridge the gap that separates it from PlayStation.

The hope is therefore that 2023 will finally be the good year, the one in which the Game Pass catalog will be filled with ambitious and thick experiences, as befits the most important productions, and in which Xbox Series X will stop being the console of the backlog and indies at €9.99 a month: after more than two years it would also be time.

Let’s talk about it is a daily opinion column that offers a starting point for discussion around the news of the day, a small editorial written by a member of the editorial staff but which is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.