It’s a confusing time to be a console warrior. What are the brave souls manning the digital trenches in the no-man’s-land between Sony and Microsoft – standing ever ready to defend their chosen mega-corporation’s honour with a carefully chosen homophobic slur – to make of headlines like ‘Six of PlayStation’s ten US biggest-selling games in Q2 2025 were published by Microsoft’?
Is this a victory for Microsoft, vindicating the quality and appeal of Xbox games and cementing it as the biggest third-party publisher in the industry? Is it a triumph for Sony, with the commercial success of PlayStation forcing its rival to release formerly exclusive titles on PS5? If all you care about is the simple heuristic of which side won, this is a deeply unsatisfying kind of headline.
The actual answer, of course, is that it’s good news for both companies. As unwelcome as that concept may be to the zero-sum console war mindset, the business rationale is straightforward – selling more games is good.
The ideal is to sell first-party games on your own platform – that’s where the margins are highest – but if and when that isn’t possible, you would happily settle either for selling your games on someone else’s platform, or having someone else sell games on your platform.
Microsoft would love if Xbox was dominating the console gaming world, of course, but it’s not – and even if it had a much higher market share than it currently does, the company’s shift to third-party publishing on rival platforms was pretty much guaranteed the second it signed the cheque to buy Activision Blizzard. For Sony, meanwhile, great third-party games on its platform are exactly what it wants – no matter who publishes them, or what console they first appeared on.
The logic that led Microsoft to publishing on rival platforms was made stark and unavoidable by the relative commercial underperformance of Xbox compared to PlayStation and Switch, but this decision is not an anomaly – it’s part of a wider trend towards multiplatform releases that’s also a commercial reality for Sony. Microsoft’s circumstances meant it got there first, but it won’t be alone for long – the Xbox installed base may be smaller than PS5’s, but it’s still a 30-odd million consumer target market that Sony’s software doesn’t currently reach.
The calculus that every platform holder must perform in this situation is to weigh up the potential sales of a game on a rival platform versus its potential value as an exclusive on your own platform. It’s an equation with a lot of moving parts, but the key ones are straightforward. How much audience growth potential is there on your own platform? As an exclusive title, how likely is it that a given game will drive new consumers to buy your console? Conversely, how much of a threat is your rival’s platform to yours? What are the odds that a given consumer will choose to buy their console over your one?
Console warriors can sense this change in the wind, and they apparently don’t like it much
Those variables work out differently depending on the game in question, but for at least some of Sony’s titles, the commercial benefit of being able to reach a decently sized new market will certainly exceed the potential of the game to drive PlayStation sales through exclusivity – especially since Microsoft is not, at this juncture, an especially serious threat to Sony in most regions’ console markets.
As publishers and platform holders scramble to find growth opportunities wherever they can, this will become impossible for the company to ignore – especially since it’s already effectively publishing games on a Microsoft platform, in the form of its Windows PC releases of major titles.
Console warriors can sense this change in the wind, and they apparently don’t like it much. There was a minor convulsion of shock and betrayal this week when a new Sony job listing was shared over social media; the company is hiring for a senior director to oversee commercial strategy for PlayStation Studios titles across non-PlayStation hardware, with the job ad specifying that to mean “Steam, Epic Games Store, Xbox, Nintendo, and mobile.”
The listing was otherwise vague, as you’d expect, but it was enough to raise the spectre of Sony publishing its exclusives on Xbox and Switch. Cue weeping and gnashing of teeth from, naturally enough, the same people who had been nauseatingly triumphalist over Xbox titles launching on PS5 only a few months ago.
It’s an overreaction, of course. This job ad doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Sony actually already has titles on all of the listed platforms thanks to the company’s various PC ports and titles such as Destiny 2 and LEGO Horizon Adventures. And it has been clear that it intends any future live-service titles to be multiplatform (although not necessarily launching on all of them at once), so an expansion of that strategy was already on the cards. Hiring someone to a senior role overseeing that side of the business makes it clear that Sony sees it as a growth area, but that’s not exactly news.
Even if this doesn’t mean major Sony exclusives are about to make their way over to Xbox in the immediate future, though, it’s pretty clear where the wind is blowing here. Sony doesn’t face quite the same pressures as Microsoft did, but it does still need to grow its audience in order to keep its business looking healthy.
Sony doesn’t face quite the same pressures as Microsoft did, but it does still need to grow
One thing that should be added to that calculation I mentioned above is the fact that game consoles no longer seem to get price cuts during their lifespan. That means one of the key dynamics of previous generations – whereby owners of one console would pick up the others cheaply late in their lifespan to play their exclusive titles – is now a much more costly and less popular proposition.
Enticing Xbox owners to buy a PS5 is a tough sell. So why not make money by selling them at least some of your software line-up instead?
The pros and cons will have to be worked out on a case-by-case basis, of course. For live-service games, where establishing a critical mass of players is by far the most important factor in success, everything will be multiplatform as soon as possible, with only narrow exclusivity windows (if any exist at all).
For Sony’s real bread and butter, though – high quality narrative-driven action adventure games – it’s more likely that the company will want to guard the exclusivity of major new titles. After all, it doesn’t even allow those games onto its own subscription services at launch, let alone a competitor’s console.
The PlayStation catalogue, however, is extensive, and older games in particular are an ideal target for porting to other systems – both to pick up some long tail revenues, and to some extent to serve as a marketing vehicle for their IP and for PlayStation more broadly. You can easily imagine, for example, that it would be advantageous to launch Ghost of Tsushima on Xbox and Switch 2 ahead of the appearance of Ghost of Yotei on PS5. It’s too late to have the wheels in motion for that particular case, of course, but it’s a likely pattern for the company’s future strategy.
It seems inevitable that this is how the future of console software will look for Sony and Microsoft – multiplatform by default, even for first-party titles, with the exception of a handful of closely guarded exclusives that are seen as platform-defining.
The Sony/Microsoft rivalry will be tempered by increasing codependence
Nintendo, as ever, is a very different story. Its consoles largely function simply as vehicles for Nintendo’s software releases, and the philosophy with which it approaches the relationship between hardware and software is very different to that of Sony or Microsoft.
But the Sony/Microsoft rivalry will be tempered by increasing codependence – relying on one another both as major publishers for each other’s platforms, and as key platform holders for each other’s third-party publishing businesses.
