Microsoft’s cross-network play

A fairly big piece of news for gaming today: Microsoft has announced support for cross-network play on Xbox, including potentially other consoles. This is something console gamers have always naturally wanted, but to my limited knowledge never widely done (except in a few games?) in previous console generations.

First of all, as a gamer this is obviously a good development. A larger network of players to play with means better network effects, possibly longer lifecycle of games (because the population is larger), shorter matchmaking queues, less anxiety about which platform to adopt (and the herd mentality of following your friends), and probably a wider choice of games. So to be completely clear, as a gamer (and owner of a PS4) I’m happy for this and hope it becomes something material and not just a marketing bullet point.

From a strategy perspective though, there are some intriguing questions, with the obvious one being why.

First, it’s important to acknowledge the macro-context that Microsoft is in – it has lost its dominance in computing, and is dangerously close to becoming another legacy tech company that will live on for decades but is completely irrelevant to most consumers¹. And in this context there’s been a big turn-about at Microsoft at embracing other people’s platforms, from the new love shown to Linux to a bigger focus of Office on iOS. This Xbox announcement follows this pattern ²

Second, there’s also the macro-context of the smartphone revolution and the future implications for games. Consider this data-point³:

I’d like to post this again. It shows SuperCell’s profit in 2015 compared to other traditional games companies. pic.twitter.com/zwOFRloSbZ

— ZhugeEX (@ZhugeEX) March 13, 2016

Supercell had 180 full-time employees in 2015. In comparison, and per Wikipedia, Activision-Blizzard, had 6,690 employees in 2015; EA, 8,400. This sharp contrast speaks not only to product strategy but also market characteristics: the power of mobile scale and the app store. A casual prediction: the first game with a billion monthly active players⁴ is not going to be a PC or console game – that number is reserved for mobile because of the install base involved.

The point is, in this context of a broader shift-to-mobile for the entire tech ecosystem, being the market leader in console actually amounts to very little, and it’s arguable that for consoles to have an independent future (and not just be subsumed into the mobile ecosystem entirely), perhaps it’s not a bad idea to ditch the barrier to entry that is compatibility. Again, being in 2nd place this gen, Microsoft has less to lose and more to gain with moving in this direction first; though Sony should think hard about whether it really wants to turn down the friend-request.

Third, and extrapolating from the second point, if the major console platforms became buddies, and also had full cross-play with PC, this “circle-the-wagons” move is likely to the benefit of most parties in the “traditional” game development space. And with both Microsoft and Apple wanting to make Windows / Mac more like mobile (the “walled garden” app stores), PC could look very similar to console from an user-experience perspective anyways.

Interesting times:)