A friend of mine said that it's "obvious that MS isn't prioritizing Xbox, so why should devs?" Indeed, GamePass is their platform now. And Microsoft doesn't do big-name exclusives anymore (or at least ones that anyone cares about, cuz some like
Halo Infinite are basically flops), and that's always been what mainly drives sales of consoles. 3rd-party games can be played on most platforms, and the player gets the choice of choosing the platform they feel the game plays best on. But exclusives are locked to the system, and those become the
real reason why a console gamer chooses to buy one platform over another. Sony and Nintendo still roll with those old-school rules, although Sony is wisening up and putting their big hits on PC, even if it's a few years later. Nintendo doesn't, hence the widespread use of Switch emulation, which they've finally been getting real sore about. But Microsoft, they don't really got much to pull players in to their platform. They own a lot of IPs now with the companies they've bought, but they're not really making good use, or any use, of any of them.
I do appreciate that Microsoft started throwing their games on PC long before Sony did, cuz people like me who have been grabbing consoles since 2nd-gen are grateful that we can play these games on PC where we wanted to play them to begin with. But Microsoft should understand that having games available on PC means less reason to buy their consoles (probably why Sony waits a few years). On PC Microsoft
tried to make their games exclusive to UWP (just like GFW/GFWL before it) but PC gamers weren't having that bullsh1t, so they relented and allowed their games to be sold on other storefronts like Steam (still waiting for them to put their games on GOG though, as Sony did with some of their games). But they HOPE we'll choose UWP/GamePass instead (we won't). So if there are other choices on PC, and there's no heavy-hitting excusives on their Xbox consoles, what good then is the Xbox brand really? Why would devs wants to put their sh1t on a Microsoft platform when Sony and even Nintendo have a higher installed base? There's nothing drawing people to Xbox, aside from those who find value in GamePass. Microsoft essentially did that to themselves.
I'm thinking it's a combination of lower playerbase and the Xbox Series S requirement.
Sure, you could argue why port a title to Xbox from the PS because the playerbase is small, but there is still a playerbase, and I bet porting a PS5 to Xbox Series X is fairly trivial due to their hardware similarities. However, when you throw on the Series S requirement (and don't forget the bulk of the Xbox playerbase is using a Series S), that porting isn't so trivial.
I keep forgetting about XBSS. Yeah, devs have been real sore about it, and how it's been holding back development and releases of games. Really holding back 9th-gen as a whole. Console devs used to love how consoles were fixed hardware. PS4 Pro and XB1X changed all that (and honestly before that, the Nintendo DSi compared to the DS, and the New 3DS compared to the 3DS). Console hardware was no longer a single SKU performance wise, and console devs had to get more used to a PC-like way of things, with different settings for games depending on the hardware. By the end of 8th-gen you saw base XB1 and PS4 struggling to run games cuz devs were focusing development around the more powerful versions. Same thing happened too with the DS and especially 3DS. Probably gonna happen again for 9th-gen too. Well technically it already has thanks to XBSS. PS5 and XBSX set a bare minimum for 9th-gen, and XBSS falling below that has kinda f*cked with devs.
