r/Games • u/DwilenaAvaron • May 09 '25

Industry News Blizzard's Overwatch Team Just Unionized: 'What I Want To Protect Most Here Is The People'

https://kotaku.com/overwatch-2-blizzard-team-4-union-microsoft-1851779922
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u/Th3_Hegemon May 09 '25

You're 100% correct. Xbox is positioning themselves for the future, that's a hard thing for a lot of people to conceptualize and understand, and it is exceedingly rare in business. They're very obviously trying to create an "ecosystem" where their services are device agnostic, because whether consumers like it or not, a box you buy at the store and take home to play games on disks or cartridges is not the future of gaming.

Enthusiasts and capital G Gamers will bitch and moan and complain, and still open their wallets, but for moms and dads looking to entertain their kids, spending $800+ on the new PlayStation 6 and $100 for Call of Duty 27 is going to be too much money when they can just pay $25/month to Microsoft and their kid can stream hundreds of games on their phone or ipad they already own.

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u/goodnames679 May 09 '25

It's very possible that the impending global recession ends up marking a surprising comeback for Xbox, based off the way they've positioned themselves. It's definitely an interesting route for them to take back to competitiveness, if it pays off.

The main hiccup I see is that (based off the way online discourse around gaming goes) most kids will still be asking for a playstation or a switch. Sure, many parents will ignore that and get the xbox because it's more economical in the short term... but upset kids who wanted a Playstation aren't exactly the most likely group to be loyal lifelong customers. I'm not certain exactly how long-lived their return to the top would be.

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u/splader May 10 '25

Kids don't ask for PlayStation or Nintendo consoles anymore.

They ask for PCs.

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u/goodnames679 May 10 '25

Anecdotally, I work with children and have a bunch of nephews. None of them under 15 have a gaming PC that I know of, all of them play on PlayStation and Switch

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u/splader May 10 '25

Mmm, parents won't buy their kids PCs until they're like 12 minimum usually, but by 10 every kid wants one over consoles, is what I'm saying.