The ownership of games and the digital transition in gaming have been heated topics. With Sony announcing their upcoming departure from physical media, XBOX has been learning from its competitors’ unpopular moves.
XBOX has launched the Disc-to-Digital program, where even delisted and physical-only releases work on its consoles. As part of Play Anywhere, XBOX also allows players to play a game on PC, provided they have a copy of it for the XBOX. By the looks of it, XBOX is far from done capitalizing on openings left by Sony.
As reported on Twitter, XBOX is sticking to physical media, at least for the foreseeable future. A new Microsoft job listing goes into detail about a ‘XBOX Games Supply Strategist’ position as part of the XBOX Supply Chain Team. The description offers a good insight into the company’s plans in this department.
The core function of the XBOX Games Supply Strategist is the coordination of the launch of physical XBOX games across all platforms, meaning that Microsoft will continue producing physical copies of games under its ownership and wants new blood to keep the process running. That’s more Call of Duty boxes on the shelf for me.
The prospective new Games Supply Strategist will oversee the journey of physical games from beginning to end, factory to console.
Naturally, this will be working in tandem with the Product Marketing, Finance, and other teams under the XBOX umbrella.
The job listing goes further to say the person will be observing the sales trends and how to improve the numbers, which is a bit of a no-brainer when you’re a strategist in a business.
Given the uneasy atmosphere around the digital versus physical debate, one of the trickier parts for XBOX will be managing the relationship between supply and demand. It’s hard to tell whether the current boost in physical sales is a knee-jerk reaction to Sony that will lose momentum, or part of a long-term reversal.
When put in perspective with the rest of the industry, the job listing shows how XBOX might have learned from the players’ reactions in these uncertain times. The physical media discourse is only a small part of the conversation happening around players’ rights, whether the company still owns the game and a person buys a subscription to it, and preservation efforts in the live-service era.
Microsoft will continue producing physical copies of games under its ownership and wants new blood to keep the process running.
Continuing the famous rivalry between XBOX and Sony, it is worth mentioning that Microsoft gained ‘custody’ of Kojima’s PHYSINT after Sony had dropped it. Instead of the planned Sony PlayStation exclusive, PHYSINT will now be made into an XBOX exclusive, so it appears that the Napoleonic maxim of “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake” is valid in the console wars as well as the battlefields of Europe.
XBOX has been championing the idea that once you buy a game, you shouldn’t have to buy it again. Not just Kojima Productions agreed with Microsoft, but so did CD Projekt Red with Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that a copy of the XBOX version will be able to be played on XBOX Play Anywhere, meaning that the PC copy of it will be available automatically and at no additional cost.
Whether it is worth switching consoles from being a loyal PlayStation gamer to XBOX still needs to be seen. XBOX is bringing its A-game forward and actually listening to the broader sentiment in gaming communities, so we might have a world where XBOX will properly tip the scales following years of Sony dominance.
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