With a campaign about Xbox as a cross-platform service and “no red lines” for first-party on other platforms, the change to Microsoft’s games business speeds to a conclusion.
It’s been clear for quite a few years that Microsoft’s notion of what “Xbox” actually means has evolved past physical consoles alone. It now describes a whole ecosystem of software and services that spans all sorts of devices, and which is itself just one outlet for Microsoft’s enormous game publishing business.
It’s taken a while for the industry to wrap its collective head around this change and some of the unusual bedfellows it has created – such as Microsoft now being one of the biggest third-party publishers on PlayStation.