Yesterday there was great news from Microsoft and Xbox, even if it doesn’t seem like it. The company has announced that it will bring Xbox Live help to three Gameloft mobile titles: Asphalt 9: Legends, Asphalt 8: Airborne, and Dragon Mania Legends. This means those games will get a ton of Xbox Live features anywhere they’re played, adding things like leaderboards, achievements, and friend lists. At first glance, this is a rather mundane corporate announcement. Microsoft’s plans for the long-term gaming.
We have a similar announcement from recently when Microsoft brought Xbox-exclusive Cuphead to Nintendo Switch with the same Xbox Live installations it now gives to Gameloft. In any case, the message is clear: Xbox Live is moving out of the network that powers gaming on Xbox. consoles to a broader back-end service that can be used across a diversity of developers across a variety of platforms.
It’s in line with the corporate paints that have shaped the backbone of Microsoft’s business for years, newly implemented in a gaming context: it turns out that Microsoft needs to be the backend that developers can use to manage their online services. Steam is doing something similar on PC and Epic Games is moving quickly to challenge that territory, however, Microsoft is well placed to make an effort on other platforms.
This has been Microsoft’s Xbox strategy since Phil Spencer took over the division. After solidly squandering the current-gen console war with Sony and PlayStation 4, the company seemed to be pivoting in a new direction: winning the console war by making it irrelevant. Microsoft’s purpose has been to continue to promote Xboxes while removing the ambiguity of the logo and its broader gaming operations of any type of express hardware. We saw it at first with Windows PC: At first, Microsoft announced that all Xbox exclusives would also be coming to the PC, and that a diversity of games would now cross-purchase and cross-play. At the time, this seemed to devalue the concept of the Xbox hardware platform, but reinforced Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to design cross-platform gaming services.
Obviously, Microsoft still makes hardware – we’re going to see the new consoles at E3 this year, and I don’t think we’ll see the end of hardware platforms or local computing in gaming anytime soon. history in the gaming industry: varied consoles, with many other graphic functions and absolutely other libraries. They’ve been converging for some time now, to the point that Xbox One and PlayStation 4 play a wide band of the same cross-platform. games with relatively similar graphics, which are basically distinguished by platform-level installations and a diversity of exclusive games that in the end make up a large part of the library.
It’s easy to believe that this story is moving towards the next generation of consoles. Fortnite is a true platform-agnostic success, and it’s arguably not the last : Publishers are eager to sell their games to as many other people as possible, which means more The erosion of distinctions not only between Xbox and PlayStation, but also between consoles, PCs and mobile devices, although the stream claims it can make hardware platforms completely irrelevant.
Again, those are long-standing trends that we might not see happen right away. But Microsoft is positioning itself for a long series of postwar consoles, where software platforms are as big, if not bigger, than hardware platforms. run, this may be a better strategy than proceeding to sell boxes.