The post-console future: where Xbox is looking for its next big hit

Microsoft is betting on winning business with its subscription service, Game Pass, and looking beyond markets in western Europe and east Asia

Microsoft has been in the video game business for over 20 years, but its Xbox console has been the perpetual runner-up. 2020's Xbox Series S/X console is being significantly outsold by Sony's PlayStation 5 - in keeping with its predecessor, 2013's Xbox One, which was outsold more than 2:1 by the PlayStation 4. It's currently suffering from a lack of big-ticket exclusive games, and its most recent, Redfall, was a critical disappointment. What's more, its huge $70bn merger with Activision Blizzard, a deal that would go a long way towards solving its content problem by buying it Call of Duty and much more, is currently being held up by UK regulators.

Looking rather downtrodden on a recent episode of gaming show Xcast, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that he was not in the business of out-consoling Sony or out-consoling Nintendo", intimating that the long-running console war between Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation was a losing battle for Microsoft. Instead of touting Xbox sales figures, for the past few years the company has presented its subscription service Game Pass as its metric for success: how many games it has, how many subscribers, how many hours they have played. It is betting on a post-console future, on being able to play games on any screen with the help of cloud servers - a streaming and subscription-centric future that has already transformed music, film and TV.