In case you didn’t notice, the console wars—the decades-long battle between mulitple companies and their plastic game boxes—ended a few years ago. And while Sony continues to fight on with its PlayStation despite the war being over, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer recently confirmed that, yeah, it’s all over, and the company is no longer trying to steal users away with exclusives.
Over the weekend, Spencer sat down for a lengthy interview with XboxEra in which he discussed his favorite games, talked about what various Xbox studios are working on, and dished on the industry at large. And he was also honest about Xbox no longer being part of any console war, as it shifts to selling Xbox games on other consoles, like PlayStation.
“I would love to make all of the money for all of the games that we ship, right? Like, obviously we make more on our own platform,” said Spencer. “It’s one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important. But there are people, whether it’s their libraries on a PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there.”
“I’m not trying to move them all over to Xbox anymore,” added Spencer.
That last quote, about not trying to bring everyone over to Xbox anymore, is a very telling one. And for sure, Xbox hasn’t really been competing with Sony or Nintendo for a few years now—that kinda stops when you start selling your games on their platforms—but this is confirmation from Spencer that Xbox was once fighting in the console wars and that it no longer is part of that battle, as the entire point of the console wars was to sell more boxes and steal away other players with exclusives.
Elsewhere in the interview, Spencer further explained that Asia is one of Xbox’s “fastest-growing regions,” and it’s thanks in large part to Cloud Gaming via Game Pass and PC. And according to Spencer, the users driving this are players who were never going to buy an Xbox.
“We were never going to catch that person with our console,” said Spencer.
So let’s find them in a way that works, and it’s better for Indiana Jones. It’s better for Xbox.”
If it wasn’t obvious before, this is the ultimate confirmation that the console wars have indeed ended.
Nintendo doesn’t care anymore and just releases consoles whenever it works best for itself rather than trying to directly compete with the other big players in the space via powerful hardware. Xbox is happy to sell you a game on PS5 or Switch or even just let you stream it via the cloud. No console needed, though it still plans on making and selling some in the future. The only one still fighting in the war is Sony. So I guess they won, but I’m not sure it really matters in 2025.
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