Microsoft’s stable of first-party games pretty much starts and ends with Halo and Forza. With the cancellation of Scalebound from developer Platinum Games in January of 2017 (after four years of prior development), and the rather ho-hum reception of 2019’s Crackdown 3, the writing was on the wall: Microsoft’s lack of interesting and exciting first-party games was becoming a problem. Compare that with Sony’s back-to-back-to-back first-party offerings, from The Last of Us to Marvel’s Spider-Man to God of War to Ghost of Tsushima and, for my money, Days Gone (R.I.P.).
So what does Microsoft have these days? In short, Game Pass is awesome, Halo still has a pulse, Forza is firing on all cylinders, and Microsoft Flight Simulator looks incredible (though I haven’t actually sat down to play the dang thing yet).
It seems clear that Microsoft’s answer to having a lack of unique and identifiable first-party titles is to just buy every other large, non-Sony-or-Nintendo-owned developer and publisher and just stack the deck. Microsoft is effectively the New York Yankees of the video game industry.
As odd as it was to watch Microsoft’s Earth-shattering acquisition of Bethesda, that now seems quaint in comparison to their most recent purchase, Activision Blizzard. And that means that heavy hitters like Call of Duty and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater are also now under the Microsoft umbrella (and possibly prone to Xbox exclusivity at some point in the future). That boggles the mind.
But one thing has become clear in all this: Microsoft, in lieu of developing its own stable of critically acclaimed first-party games, is just gonna buy every other game property it can get its hands on.
Now, that isn’t to say that Microsoft won’t tap some of those Activision developers to create new and interesting games and focus less on the Call of Duty assembly line. And what are they going to do with Blizzard, for that matter? After working on the Warcraft and Diablo franchises for decades, they seem like they have the chops to make the next major contender in the open-world action RPG genre. I’m just spinning my wheels here, but that’s probably what I’d like to see most from Blizzard under Microsoft based on my own personal preferences.
But there are a number of older games published by Activision and developed by internal studios like Raven or Radical that I would love to see brought back in some form or another, whether that be outright sequels or even spiritual successors. But then again, Call of Duty is a moneymaker, so it would probably be just as lucrative, if not more so, to just keep on keeping on with the yearly COD churn. Zzzzzzz….
To be perfectly honest, I don’t much care for many of the games that have been coming out of Activision Blizzard, so if Microsoft continues with business as usual, it’s no skin off my back. But it seems like the best-case scenario would be that, instead of simply buying the competition into submission, Microsoft would instead encourage these developers to find their own The Last of Us or Ghost of Tsushima and create the slew of exclusives it so direly needs. Sony could really use some real competition, I think.
