Xbox Boss Says He Has "Zero Energy" For Console Wars, As It Should Be

The year is 2021. We are barely two years into a new decade, and we've already been dragged through what feels like a century's worth of shit. Disease. Rioting. Climate catastrophe. Injustice. Corruption.

Frankly, if you're still out here arguing about whether PlayStation or Xbox is better? You're a tool. There are bigger things to be dealing with. Video games are properly awesome. They're transformative, joyous experiences that can bring out the best in us. But too often is that joy bogged down by toxic fans and needless tribalism.

I'm tired of the very idea of "console wars". I expect most of you reading this are, too. And so is Xbox boss Phil Spencer, who once again recently reiterated that neither he nor Microsoft have any energy to dedicated on the archaic concept.

“I spend zero energy on ‘how do I make other gaming platforms smaller so that Xbox gets bigger’,” Spencer told Edge magazine. “I’m more interested in the growing pie of gaming than I am our slice of the pie-eating into someone else’s.

“And it’s why we focus on things like cross-play and cross-saves. I think about these scenarios of why you and I maybe can’t play a game together, and it shouldn’t be because of the console you bought versus the console I bought.”

He continued: “That doesn’t help the industry grow, when we put artificial barriers up on those things. Whether that means we’re doing something different than the other guys, you’d have to ask them. But I’d say for us, it’s not about somebody else getting smaller so that we get bigger.”

While critics might point out that moves like buying Bethesda and making The Elder Scrolls VI Xbox exclusive seem exclusionary, that would be willfully missing everything else Xbox and Microsoft are doing in terms of breaking down barriers between platforms.

No, you won't be able to play The Elder Scrolls VI on a PlayStation 5. But do you know where you will be able to play it as long as you have an Xbox Game Pass subscription? Pretty much any other device with a screen and an internet connection. So let's just put the console wars to bed and enjoy video games, yeah? Yeah.

Topics: Xbox, PlayStation