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Summary
- Microsoft’s strategy of expanding game availability pays off with titles on Sony’s top-selling list.
- Transitioning Xbox from a console to a gaming company brings success, merging console and PC gaming.
- The console market evolves drastically – exclusivity wanes, integration expands, and company strategies shift.
The console gaming scene has turned really strange in the past few years. Before, we saw three individual camps vying to compete with one another using raw processing power and exclusive titles. Now, we see Sony trying to take the home console market, Nintendo capitalizing on the handheld scene, and Microsoft throwing its arms in the air and just turning every device on the planet into an Xbox.
Part of Microsoft’s strategy involved scrapping the power of exclusivity deals for its platform, opting to bring its games to as many devices as possible, including Sony and Nintendo consoles. Well, if the Q2 sales reports from Sony are anything to go by, it seems that Microsoft’s gambit is paying off, as its titles have found their way into six of the ten top-selling titles on PlayStation consoles.

Source: Screen Rant
As spotted by Windows Central, the Executive Director and Video Game Industry Analyst at Circana, Mat Piscatella, made a post on Bluesky about the PlayStation storefront’s recent sales. It’s quite the sight to behold: out of the top ten best-selling titles on PlayStation consoles for the second quarter, six of them have Microsoft’s name on them. In fact, Microsoft would have taken over the entire top six if MLB: The Show 25 hadn’t held the #3 spot as Sony’s only entry.
Mat ponders what people a decade ago would have thought about this chart, and honestly, they make an excellent point. Ten years ago, each console manufacturer had their exclusives and guarded them like they were made of solid gold; now, seeing Microsoft cross-pollinating over to Sony’s consoles and making a ton of sales at the same time would have been unthinkable back in 2015.
There’s a good chance that Microsoft’s main goal is to make “Xbox” less of a console brand and more of an overall gaming company. We’re already seeing the lines between the Xbox and PC scenes begin to blur, and with Microsoft’s “everything is an Xbox” campaign aiming to bring its Cloud Gaming service to as many devices as possible, it’s clear the company doesn’t want just to keep itself confined to the Xbox Series X, S, and whatever else the company is working on in the background. It’ll be interesting to see if Sony brings its own titles to Xbox and PC in response, but one thing’s for sure: pigs will fly before we’ll get an official port of a Mario game to PC.