Former PlayStation Boss Says It's Impossible For Xbox To Be A Platform And A Publisher

Xbox is having an identity crisis. It started off big on exclusives, keeping titles like Halo, Gears of War, and Forza on its own system, and buying a bunch of studios to bolster its first-party ranks. It then decided that this probably wasn't the best way to make money and started releasing its biggest games on PlayStation instead, to varying degrees of success.

Now that new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has come in, Xbox is now potentially pivoting back to exclusives, with Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution first out the gate, and it's hard to pin down exactly what the plan is at the moment. However, there is one person that thinks Xbox is going to have to make a difficult choice soon, and that's former Sony boss Shawn Layden.

Former Sony Boss Says Xbox Has A Choice To Make

Over the course of the flurry of dire announcements coming out of Xbox, Layden took a potshot at the company saying that those in charge had "a basic misunderstanding of how the interactive entertainment world moves." When asked by Eurogamer to explain himself a bit more in detail, Layden basically said that Xbox needs to make a choice regarding what it wants the future of the company to be - a successful console manufacturer and platform, or a successful publisher.

"There's two roads," says Layden. "To 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."

"But those two roads do not converge. Those two roads necessarily diverge, because to be a platform and to be a very well-supported, well-accepted, well-selling platform, you need exclusive content. Nintendo needs its Mario and its Zelda, and PlayStation needs Crash Bandicoot and Astro Bot, and Kratos and Horizon, all of that. But 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."

It's sound reasoning, and if there's someone that should be listened to, it's the man that helped guide PlayStation to become the juggernaut that it is today. If Xbox wants to be a successful platform, it needs to eat the costs of development and start making games exclusive. If not, then it needs to release everything on everything. You can't have your cake and eat it.

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