Remember when the PS4 was in development 10 or so years ago. Sony stated that they thought it might be the last console in the traditional sense. Many were already pinning the future on removing the need for physical hardware and for gaming to move completely to steaming. Which has now adopted the name cloud gaming.

So what happened?

Stadia was the first completely cloud based gaming service. They released set top boxes to access the service for those without other hardware that could access the service, and they released dedicated consoles. But it failed after 3 years and has now just closed its doors. Why? It was the wrong business model.

To understand why look at Xbox Gamepass. It's very similar to Netflix or Disney+. You pay your monthly subscription and you gain access to everything in its library to stream whilst you continue subscribing. There are no paywalls to the content. You get everything. Stadia instead only offered a small library of older games included which the subscription. You had to buy any other games you wished to play. This raised the question what were you actually buying? You had to have an active aubscription to play any games on Stadia. So even if you owned a game on the service you couldn't access it unless you were subscribed. No other service works like that and that's why it failed. If you buy a product you need to either have a physical copy or a easy to access it without continuously payments.

Now Microsoft have gone the other way. The Xbox isn't enjoying very strong sales compared to the PS5. Most Xbox gamers buy the system for Gamepass. The problem is that when you offer first day releases and most of the AAA titles in a single subscription library it's great for the end user, but there is limited incentive to buy any more games. And as console makers sell consoles at a loss they hope to make the costs back in software sales as they take a cut off the sales.

Sony in this regard have a much better business model. PS5 is still very much a traditional console with gamers buying games and nettting Sony 30% of all sales revenue. So they are easily getting their money back on the console sales. But with PS Plus Extra they are also offering a Gamepass style library so gamers are getting thy best of both worlds. But Sony are being smart about this by not including day one releases, so the developers and Sony make maximum returns on new releases. Then they add them to either the PS Plus monthly game giveaways or add them to the Extra library after say a year, and this generates continued income from the games as many still have DLC that needs to be purchased.

So what is the future? Sony have this generation sown up. PS5 sales are about twice that of Xbox S/X and I'm fairly certain the majority of Xbox sales are for the less powerful S as it's a great price point for parents to afford, and with Gamepass offers great value for money as an all tou can eat gaming platform wet no extra costs involved.

But if Xbox hardware sales don't perform this generation what does that mean for the future? Could we see a time where Xbox is no longer a hardware platform, but instead a multiplatform subscription service?

Could we eventually see Xbox Gamepass on the Playstation? Not too sure that would ever happen, but you never know.

Or with the size of wealth of the parent company will Microsoft justvkeep turning out Xbox generations at a loss to keep their foot in the gaming market?

I really hope Xbox continued into the future. We need competition to innovate and push. But the PS4 and Xbox One hinted at it, and PS5 and Xbox X confirmed that hardware is converging. Both platforms share veey similar architecture, and every closer to PC, making it very easy to port games between all 3. If they continue to converge will there come a time when we do just have a generic hardware that can run whichever gaming service you subscribe to? Just as we anyway do for streaming services on our smart TVs? Or will gaming platforms continue to be seperate devices?

Gaming is great and we have never had it better. We have access to more at our fingertips than ever before.
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