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Are Things Looking Bad for Xbox in 2017?

Are Things Looking Bad for Xbox in 2017?

One NeoGaf user, to which the Crackdown 3 rumor is owed, couldn’t have put it better when he said that Scalebound ‘s cancellation is “a big blow to the Xbox line up. Honestly there’s a serious lack of single player story driven games. Well, exclusive ones at least. Everything is literally MP focused.” Unless Microsoft has “a bunch of first party studios secretly tucked away somewhere” I highly doubt that any Xbox games are going to wow anyone at E3. Even if Microsoft unveils the Scorpio, it has to offer a variety of content to back it up. The games so far just won’t cut it, and Microsoft needs to get it together.

The Xbox One doesn’t have much left for exclusive titles. In comparison to Sony, which has stated that it has even more titles to announce, Xbox might as well be dead in the water when it comes to content. Right now, Microsoft has little more than ten games and a handful of indie titles for 2017. The lineup certainly isn’t doing it for me. Crackdown 3 looks great, but rumor has it that it’s not going to make it out this year. State of Decay 2 is another zombie game I’m not interested in. I only need strategy games in small doses, so Halo Wars 2 is out. That leaves Cuphead and Sea of Thieves . Both are extremely promising games that I look forward to. Perhaps not as much as some PS4 games, but it’s up there.

That leaves me with two games for a whole year, and with the small variety available, many others probably feel similarly. So what is Microsoft’s plan? Is the idea to focus on technology more than games or will an amazing line of titles suddenly appear at E3 2017? A focus on technology might make sense, to somehow out-gun Sony with Project Scorpio. That’s a business venture to which I suggest packing the shortest rulers you can find to measure the length of each company’s technological stride, also known as the most absurd idea I’ve ever heard. There is no “out gunning” each other, Sony and Microsoft are already the two largest console making companies in the world. There is no need to compare whose 8K HDR 12 teraflop machine is better when the only real innovation at this point is how the technology is used, not the fidelity of it.

Are Things Looking Bad for Xbox in 2017?

The “how” is almost solely reliant on content. Without good games to hold up a given console, no one is going to buy said console. People want the most they can get out of their console, which means buying the console that has the most games they’ll likely be interested in. Right now, that’s in favor of Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo because it can sell nostalgia like a drug, and Sony through the sheer amount of variety. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be doing well on the nostalgia front, but that’s okay because only Nintendo can do that with extreme consistency. Numbers? Being under 15 for exclusive content is not a good start, especially when most are combat-heavy games not everyone is interested in. Where are the hardcore RPGs? The survival horror? Adventure? More than one type of platformer?

The key here is variety, and Microsoft simply doesn’t have that right now. I would say that the company is trying to focus on the PC, but if that were true the Scorpio wouldn’t exist. Microsoft wants to push consoles, it just has no idea how and still demands we give it a gold star for trying. Get it together, Microsoft, and bring better content to the stage.

Image #1 source: Deviant Art

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