Xbox Boss Says He's No Longer Trying to Convince PS5 Players to Switch Systems 1
Image: Push Square

Talkative Xbox executive Phil Spencer says he’s given up trying to convince PS5 owners to switch to Microsoft’s machine, as his company increasingly becomes multiformat.

“I’m not trying to move [PS5 players] over to Xbox anymore,” he told the XboxEra podcast. “We’re all so invested in where our games are, let’s just allow more people to play.”

During its attempts to acquire Activision Blizzard, Spencer told courts that every time Microsoft sold a game on the PS5, Sony would pocket 30% of the income and use it to cut deals with third-party publishers, blocking the release of those games on Xbox.

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The 30% fee applies to all third-party publishers releasing their games on PlayStation, and is generally considered an industry standard for any platform holder.

As his company brings more and more games to PlayStation, Spencer was asked if he still feels the same way about effectively lining Sony’s pockets with his own company’s software.

“It’s maybe not what I was going to say [during the Activision Blizzard trial] at the time but yeah, I would love to make all of the money for all the games that we ship right now,” he explained. “Obviously we make more on our own platform, it’s one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important.

“But there are people – whether it’s their libraries are on PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s that they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there – and I don’t want to then look at that and say ‘Well, there’s no way that we should be able to build a business there, find fans of our franchises there.’”

Spencer continued that the 70% it makes on other platforms ultimately will help his company to build a “great portfolio” of games.

The reality is that Xbox spent close to $100 billion buying two multiformat publishers, and with sales of its hardware torpedoing, it threatens to devalue those investments by restricting its releases to a flagging brand.

As a trillion dollar company, Microsoft may have deep pockets, but it’s not immune to the rising costs of development, and considering Game Pass has also affected full-price software sales in its ecosystem, it needs to start finding some income somewhere – even if it is only 70% of the software it sells.

[source youtube.com, via videogameschronicle.com]