Phil Spencer wants third-party stores on Xbox

The console market is in a difficult moment and without a doubt, Xbox is the platform most affected by this situation. We saw the clearest example of this just a few days ago when we learned that European developers and retailers may be considering dropping support for the current generation of Microsoft’s console. And to these circumstances we have to add a huge pile of mistakes that Microsoft made in the previous generation, something that even Spencer himself mentioned on more than one occasion as a big drag on the Xbox Series X|S.

It is true that the head of Xbox recently stated that there will be a future generation of the console, and in this regard, based on what Spencer has advanced, my colleague Isidro has done a very complete and interesting analysis of what the next generation from Microsoft. We now have a technical platform with enormous performance It’s only part of the equationand depending on what conditions it may not be the most important after all.

We need to focus on the games, on the titles available for the platform (and here again we return to one of the main mistakes of the last generation). In this context, Microsoft was able to make a move with the acquisition of studiosand here we have to focus on Zenimax and Activision Blizzard King, as well as agreements with other developers and distributors, which also served to feed the Xbox Game Pass catalog.

We know that one of Microsoft’s plans is to expand the Xbox’s reach, both through the Xbox Cloud on multiple platforms and by jumping some of its games that have been exclusive to competing consoles, but this seems to be just one part. plan. The second part, as we read in Ars Technica, is that Phil Spencer wants third-party digital stores to come to Xbox.

So it seems, and when it comes to games, the strategy adopted by Microsoft includes to extend the reach of your own titles to as many platforms as possible and the maximum possible number of titles to your own platform. However, at this point, the movement to give up their exclusives is very timid, and the arrival of new stores on Xbox is an attitude, not a reality at this point. Therefore, we will have to wait to check the final extent of this model change proposed by Spencer.