Despite "a rocky couple of years," analyst reckons Xbox's console war is "actually looking pretty bright" - "If you look at the PlayStation sales chart, you see a lot of Microsoft on there"

While the past few years have been somewhat up and down for Xbox as a whole, one industry analyst believes that the company is starting to correct course in time for a bumper 2025 for the brand.

In an interview with GamesRadar+, Mat Piscatella, executive director of games at Circana, discussed Xbox's past, present and future, believing that the company's favours are about to turn, partly due to strong PlayStation sales. "If you look at what's going on now in the sales, you look at like the PlayStation sales chart, you see a lot of Microsoft on there. And the more that they can broaden the appeal of their products, their IP across other platform holders, why not do that?"

For Piscatella, the key to Xbox's future is to embrace other platforms, rather than competing with them, and to ensure that even if console sales falter, as they have in recent years, they can still make up for that with sales of their games. "You look towards the future and some of the things they've talked about, expanding the reach of the Xbox brand well beyond the Xbox console is a key initiative and they're executing on that," he explains. "You look at their results in their earnings reports, and you go, okay, that looks pretty darn good, even though they recognize that console sales themselves are lagging for them. You look at it that way and the future is actually looking pretty bright, although, yeah, it's been a rocky couple of years for sure."

With Xbox having invested so heavily in expanding Game Pass, to which subscriptions have long since begun to plateau, Piscatella believes that one of the service's most important aspects is as a marketing machine for Xbox titles, describing it as "having more of a broad approach where subscriptions are more a part of doing things like driving sales on other platforms and ecosystems."

He views Game Pass as an important part of Xbox's brand but believes that Xbox's move to a more balanced approach, as opposed to their previous focus on the service, is a smart one. "I think it has a really nice role to fill in a portfolio of products being offered to consumers. But perhaps the previous strategy of going all in on just that, course correcting from that seems to have been a good decision."

Piscatella notes that, with games such as Helldivers 2, PlayStation has made more of an effort to capture audiences on other platforms, but that Xbox has been far more aggressive in this regard, and that if the company wants to continue on its upward trajectory, then continuing to sell well across all platforms will be exactly how Xbox and Microsoft can do it.

Whether you're a Game Pass subscriber or not, why not check out the best Xbox Series X games to play right now?