The PlayStation-Xbox Console War Is Over

For as long as video game consoles have existed, there has been some sort of conflict between owners of rival systems across Atari, Nintendo, SEGA and for the last twenty years or so, Xbox, PlayStation and…still Nintendo.

This has created entrenched camps of devoted fans who go to internet war with each other with each new development across all the consoles, but now, more than ever, this whole thing is just…over. The “big three” have splintered in ways that simply do not have them competing in the same fashion as before, and recent developments at Microsoft seem like they’ve now ended this entire, often very dumb contest for good.

If there’s a winner here, it’s probably Nintendo, who has barely even been involved in any of this for years now. It’s sold a zillion Switches and exists on its own island of originals and maybe the occasional port of third party games that must de-scale themselves to work on the platform. Now they’re about to make a Switch 2 that will….sell a zillion units.

So, it’s mainly been PlayStation and Xbox competing against one another directly for years now. Microsoft especially has repeatedly said they’re not doing console wars, and has said they’re more in competition with places like Google and Apple than PlayStation. Okay.

But now Xbox is just…truly not caring even a little bit about any of this. They are on the road to effectively becoming a third party publisher releasing games on all platforms, including PlayStation. Yes, right now there’s a time delay, but it’s clear nothing is off the table to move across the chasm. Previously, even if Microsoft was downplaying console sales, there was at least this narrative that they had scooped up all these studios to finally make attractive games to compete with Sony’s first party offerings. Now, those games are trickling over to PlayStation anyway leaving devoted Xbox fans to wonder…why they are still devoted Xbox fans. Microsoft will continue to make hardware as an option, but after being drastically behind PlayStation sales for a full two generations now, they are just not meaningful competitors in that space as they turn toward the cloud and subscriptions to Game Pass.

So has PlayStation “beaten” Microsoft? Maybe in console sales, but that’s not exactly news. But Sony is facing its own significant challenges, as they too are realizing something similar to Microsoft, that pure console exclusives vastly limit your reach. Making enormous budget single player games may win awards with their quality, but limited to PlayStation or even just PS5, that’s a problem. So Sony too now has been forced to expand with time-delayed PC release or now, launching its live service games day and date with PC.

Sony is stuck between continuing to make its giant single player games and knowing revenue is limited for them, and trying to break into live service. But that is an incredibly difficult market with millions of people content to keep playing Fortnite, Roblox and Warzone for years and years. Sony did have a brilliant bit of success with the Helldivers 2 launch, but they cancelled Naughty Dog’s Last of Us multiplayer game which cost their prized studio years of work, and now Concord, which reportedly has been in development for eight years, is about to unavoidably tank when it’s released tomorrow.

I would say that…gamers have still won here. There are loads of awesome games across multiple consoles and of course, PC, and less exclusivity is good for actual consumers. But Microsoft and Sony especially are both running into significant problems with their respective models, and even if PlayStation has outsold Xbox consoles for a decade now, it’s a bit more complicated than that. But yes, anything resembling an actual console war is effectively over now. That’s just not how the industry works now in 2024.

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