Former PlayStation head Shawn Layden has urged Asha Sharma at Xbox to decide whether it wants to be a publisher or a platform holder.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Layden says, "There's two roads," when it comes to what Microsoft can do, that is "be a competitive platform rival in the marketplace with PlayStation, or the biggest game publisher in the world, which based on all their acquisitions, they're either there or they're very close to it."
However, Microsoft's inconsistent decision making has seen the Xbox brand try to be both, as it went all-in on releasing its games on PS5, before running it back with the likes of Gears of War E-Day,
"Those two roads do not converge," Layden says, adding, "to be a platform and to be a very well-supported, well-accepted, well-selling platform, you need exclusive content." He explains, "Nintendo needs its Mario and its Zelda, and PlayStation needs Crash Bandicoot and Astro Bot and Kratos and Horizon, all of that." Granted, Crash Bandicoot is now owned by Xbox, but he was the de facto PlayStation mascot for its early years.
He adds, "If you're going to be the biggest publisher in the world, which is not a bad ambition - I'm sure there's gold on them there hills - you have to bring your stuff on every platform. Multi-platform is almost a prerequisite."
Layden explains, "When I was running PlayStation Studios, even in our biggest year, we never got over maybe 22 percent market share," and that the remainder was made up primarily by the biggest third-party publishers.
"As a first-party platform, our job was almost not to be the biggest game publisher in the world." Layden adds, "I wasn't making games so I could steal market share from EA or steal market share from Activision. My job was to make games that made the pie bigger, and my opportunity was in growing it out."
Unfortunately, right now the only consistent thing from Xbox is that people will be laid off in droves on a pretty much yearly basis, if the five rounds of layoffs since the Activision Blizzard purchase are anything to go by. And while Microsoft is bound to release Call of Duty on other platforms for a while yet, the idea of spending disgusting amounts of money to own the biggest franchises in the world and then still releasing them for your rivals is somewhat confusing.
