Xbox

Microsoft's $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition closed in late 2023, but 2024 brought painful follow-through: studio closures including Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin, and a strategic pivot that put former Xbox-exclusive titles like Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves on PlayStation, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle following onto PS5 in 2025. Hardware sales have continued trailing the PS5 by a wide margin, and Microsoft has leaned harder into Game Pass and third-party hardware partnerships, including co-developing handhelds with ASUS, rather than treating the Xbox console itself as the product.

Our take: Microsoft made the correct, if unflattering, calculation that it can't win a console-exclusivity war against Sony and doesn't need to — it just needs you playing its games and subscribing to Game Pass on whatever box you own. That's a defensible business strategy, but it's also a quiet admission that "Xbox" the hardware brand has lost the argument it spent two decades making, even as Xbox the publishing and subscription business gets healthier.

Watch Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's performance inside Game Pass alongside next-gen hardware rumors — if Microsoft's next console move is another ASUS-style partner device rather than a traditional first-party box, that's confirmation the exclusivity era is over for good.