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We had something called a “Bomb Cyclone” over here, which sounds bad, but it was okay! Well, it was okay if you live on what we call The West Side. On The East Side, something like a half a million homes had no power. It essentially turns your home into a freezing, freestanding Cave and it instituted a kind of extemporaneous “Return To Office” mandate but it was mostly just to charge people’s phones. It made relatively normal things difficult, and it made difficult things impossible.
I was thinking about the Xbox, what is an Xbox, This Is An Xbox thing a bit more and I understand why it is happening, and why it has to happen, and ultimately it’s probably for the best from a consumer perspective but anytime an epoch shifts it’s worth taking a second to look at it with both eyes.
It’s like when an iceberg flips. The profound investments they’ve made in publishers mean that reserving any content strictly for their own platform is, uh, contraindicated. Try to imagine what these meetings must look like internally! They built a whole console business, even won a round of the console war, more or less invented what people expect from an ecosystem, and now we’re here – where it doesn’t make sense and is in fact nuts to maintain the original course. It would be like Netflix saying you could only watch Netflix on your Netflix television. It’s incoherent. But there’s an angle I think sorta makes sense.
Ultimately, I think the Xbox as a hardware platform becomes a portable in the vein of a Steam Deck. This isn’t magical or mysterious thinking; they’ve been considering this play for way over a decade. But somewhere between the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck is a device that really can do it all – can encompass the range implied by Game Pass as a service, their cloud aspirations, and a coherent hardware platform that is as comfortable in a dock as it is in your backpack. That’s got to be the play. A new piece of dedicated, “set top” hardware to go blow for blow with Sony is just nuts at this juncture. But a lil’ guy, whose DLSS can let it punch way above its weight at home? I mean, yeah. Obviously.
Durty Dwab is Animal Welling over on the stream, should you require electronic company.
(CW)TB out.