The “console wars” have largely been relegated to the past, and are, probably rightfully, the butt of jokes nowadays. But in a world where Xbox seems to be actively shriveling up into a husk of itself, I think there’s at least a little real nostalgia to be had for a time when it was a functional company and competitor to Sony. For one, it gave players a lot more meaningful choice in how they played games. For two, I think it’s nice that Xbox employed people.
I’m thinking about this because of a remark made by former Sony Interactive Entertainment America CEO Shawn Layden when we spoke last week. I had originally reached out to Layden about rising hardware prices, but a busy news cycle led me to also ask him about PlayStation planning to discontinue discs in 2028, and also about the recent chaos at PlayStation’s long-time competitor, Xbox. Last week, Xbox announced it would lay off a total of about 3,200 people, half now, half sometime in the next year, as it undergoes a drastic restructuring amid falling profit margins and what seems to be a long history of starry-eyed overspending on studios it couldn’t support. Not exactly the finest moment for what was once a powerful rival to Layden’s division.
I didn’t expect Layden to gloat about this, of course. There’s nothing celebratory here, even for those who still work at PlayStation. People are hurting, and this mess is going to ripple out into the rest of the industry for years to come. Layden was reflective as he talked about how it’s unfortunate that mass layoffs like this seem to be part of the ebb and flow of the games industry now, thanks to companies growing more and more risk-averse as they get larger and larger. They shoot for absolutely massive, expensive hits, and when some of those hits inevitably fail, jobs and more are lost.
But Layden did surprise me with the next part of his response, which was more nostalgic. He told me he misses the old, powerful, thriving Xbox:
I really hope, and this is sincere, I really hope Xbox finds a way to become competitive again in platform hardware. That may sound strange coming from me, but back with PS3 and 360, that was the halcyon days of the platform wars. It was like Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier. Everybody had a dog in that hunt. Everybody had team blue or team green, whichever it was, that they were supporting. And it was so vibrant that it elevated the entire gaming industry.
People talk about E3, Xbox and PlayStation throwing down at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. It got a lot of coverage, got a lot of interest. People wanted to be part of that exciting rivalry experience. And both platforms pushed the other to be better…I think a certain energy around innovation, a certain desire towards differentiation, these things become a bit muted in a world with one dominant player…Yeah, I would like to see Xbox get some of its mojo back.
The end of Layden’s response tied into broader points he made in our hardware discussion, in which he remarked that he thinks the industry is increasingly rallying around monocultures, and that companies are growing afraid to take risks and experiment with new kinds of games. Layden believes this problem will fester as we approach the next console generation, where rising prices are causing gamers to interrogate more closely why they might purchase an expensive piece of gaming hardware to begin with. Whatever the gaming future looks like, it shaping up to be less and less like Layden’s fond memories of the platform wars. It remains to be seen if Xbox will be a meaningful part of it at all.
