GDC has just wrapped up. The annual Games Developer Conference took place in San Francisco and saw thousands of game developers from all around the world flock together to celebrate games, share industry insight and more.
Due to the event’s nature revolving around in-industry developers, there was a lot of talk about the future of gaming, where brands are going and where some brands are lacking. According to GameIndustry.biz, Microsoft’s reputation amongst developers isn’t great. So much so that many of them have expressed doubts about supporting the Xbox platform due to flatlining sales across hardware and the lack of return on Xbox Game Pass.
Chris Dring from the publication says his biggest takeaway from GDC was that “Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer”. He continued to say that prominent studios and even small-scale developers claim Xbox’s performance is flatlining in Europe.
“You can follow our monthly coverage in the games market and you can see that Xbox sales are falling, and it’s been falling all throughout last year and it’s falling even harder this year. The phrase one major company who released a big game last year said [was], ‘I don’t know why we bothered supporting it”
Retailers in Europe have already been cutting back on their Xbox stock with fewer consoles being sold and almost no physical hardware available in-store. Dring says that developers naturally feel like the gaming market is now PS5 and PC and putting effort and resources into building Xbox Series X/S games doesn’t show a return.
He claims that Xbox’s reputation is the same across the industry. At GDC especially, most publishers believe there “is no point” in developing for Xbox.
“And with Xbox putting some of the games on PS5—from what I understand the majority of them will be coming across at some point, assuming it progresses as Xbox believes it probably will—I think Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer, and that was the thing that came out of GDC for me. I thought it would be fine, but then I didn’t really factor in that some developers and publishers might just go, ‘yeah I don’t, you know, is there any point?’ And that is when you can lose it.”
You can watch the full chat below:
