People have been prognosticating for years – decades, even – about the end of video game consoles, but PlayStation boss Shawn Layden is convinced we've not seen the final generation yet. However, he's not convinced Xbox will be part of whatever's next, as the company's current state is a little too reminiscent of Sega's position at the turn of the century.
"Watching what Xbox has been doing recently, I do get Dreamcast flashbacks," Layden tells GamesIndustry.biz. "I think Sega realised they just were better off being a software house. I think Microsoft is in that same sort of fork in the road. And I don't think their hardware offering is persuasive enough to make up the ground they've lost."
After establishing itself as a gaming powerhouse to compete with Nintendo in the '90s, a string of console failures led to Sega famously exited the hardware business in 2001 in the wake of disappointing sales for the Dreamcast. Since then, the company has built itself back up as one of the biggest third-party developers in the world, continuing to pump out new entries in beloved series like Sonic and Like a Dragon – just not for its own consoles.
In many ways, Xbox has already gone third-party, since so many of its big games are either now available on PS5 or soon will be. Still, the Xbox Series X continues to be supported, and earlier this year Microsoft teased that "next-generation Xbox consoles" are in the works.
But what's a game console without exclusive games? Layden's been making the Dreamcast allusions to Xbox for some time, noting earlier this year that a multiplatform strategy "makes the conversation harder to create the FOMO." He added, "We've seen it before. I was in the business when Sega brought their Dreamcast titles to PS2, in time then Sega became a software-only company."
For now, these are the best Xbox exclusives you need to own.
