The Playstation Showcase has presented a good part of the titles that Sony is going to launch in the coming days. And although there is some revelation (‘Marathon’, a generous gameplay of ‘Spider-Man 2’), there is a certain feeling that there has been a lot of filler (what was a Splatoon clone like ‘Foamstars’ doing there) and few exclusives. Among all those who could take advantage of this situation, Xbox stands out.
Good trolling. It was yesterday, after the Showcase: the Xbox official account he tweeted “How good this group looks” and showed an image next to the caption ‘Soon on Xbox’: twelve games that had been presented at the Playstation Showcase. They were ‘Immortals of Aveum’, ‘Ghost Runner II’, ‘Marathon’, ‘Metal Gear Solid Triangle: Snake Eater’, ‘Dragon’s Dogma II’, ‘Alan Wake 2’, ‘The Plucky Squire’, ‘Teardown’, ‘ Assassin’s Creed – Mirage’, ‘Neva’, ‘Cat Quest’ and The Talos Principle II’.
It is trend. It is true that Sony presented other games, some of them exclusive, such as the aforementioned ‘Spider-Man 2’, the PSVR2 titles or the indie ‘Sword of the Sea’, but the truth is that there was even more cross-platform than the ones mentioned the Xbox account, such as ‘Street Fighter 6’, ‘Final Fantasy XVI’ or ‘Ultros’. Although, yes, many of them are temporary exclusives for Playstation. In any case, the tweet has achieved its effect: the next day Xbox is a trend on social networks and Playstation is not, because if something is liked on the networks it is a bloody irony.
The state of things. But what the tweet also serves is to put on the table a not very rosy vision of the industry and that, yes, also points to Xbox. Because Microsoft’s slap works in two directions: the exclusive Playstation games presented at the Showcase are a bit watered down… but so are they if we consider them Xbox games. Especially now that, after the fiasco of ‘redfall‘, Microsoft has ‘Starfield’ left and few other exclusives of that size.
The problem of multiplatforms. Multi-platform games have, at an industrial level, innumerable advantages. Above all, companies find it easier to recover the money invested: the possibilities with the platforms multiply, and although they receive less love from hardware manufacturers than the exclusive ones, they are usually safe bets in the big franchises. Their problem is that they rarely exploit the possibilities of the platforms: it is normal, they go to the lowest common denominator and they have to work, with slight variations, on all hardware variants. They are the unsalted bread of video games.
The same are. And this is what that Xbox tweet is actually talking about, although the load of self-criticism is not voluntary: how Playstation and Xbox are the same at the catalog level, with slight variations. A handful of common elements that are never going to squeeze the possibilities of their respective hardware. But of course, Xbox knows that it has the upper hand because yes, its games will be the same as those of Playstation, but… does Sony have a Game Pass? Identical catalog (except for some things), yes, but on Xbox everything accessible for a fee that, for the moment, in accessibility and price Playstation Plus does not match.
