By Nelson Schneider - 06/21/26 at 02:58 PM CT
Lately, all of the rumors and speculation about the impending demise of Xbox has lead to an uptick in so-called “concern trolling,” wherein Gamers ruminate over the impact on Gaming by the exit of one of the three console gaming platform holders. Commonly, this concern trolling is couched in the tenants of Free Market Capitalism, with worries that fewer competitors in the Gaming space will allow the remaining competitors to engage in anti-competitive practices.
To this particular flavor of concern trolling – especially when it involves the Microsoft Games division now officially known as XBOX (in all caps) – I have nothing but scoffs and disdain to offer. Do we really think that Xbox is good for the Free Market of Gaming? Is the notoriously monopolistic and anti-competitive Microsoft contributing positively to Industrial Gaming? Do we really think that Sony, without it’s alleged “greatest competitor,” will suddenly begin a descent into anti-customer practices? Well, that last one doesn’t really require much imagination OR the full exit of Xbox from console gaming, as Sony has been on the bleeding edge of anti-consumer-rights for at least two console Generations now, and in this regard seem to be perfectly willing to blaze new trails of enshittification, regardless of what the competition does.
Even Nintendo has been riding high on the overwhelming success of the original Switch, and has been pushing the envelope with regards to what customers will tolerate and how minimal they can truly make a Minimum Viable Product. Cases in point: The continuously terrible Nintendo Online services with their ever-multiplying add-on tiers, and their push toward pricing some of their worst tentpole franchise sequels at an $80 MSRP.
Indeed, it seems less like Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo are competitors, but are rather in collusion with each other to seek new monetization strategies and squeeze more profit out of the Games Industry without actually making their products and/or services better. “Competition” in the Free Market is supposed to be a battle to see who can provide the best goods and services for the lowest price, yet, increasingly, Industrial Gaming looks less like competition for customers and more like a contest between the players to see which one is willing to make the next anti-consumer move (that they ALL want to make) first in order to enrich their shareholders.
In the halcyon days of the Console Gaming Golden Age, there were a lot more “competitors” than just Nintendo and Sega, or Nintendo Sega and Sony, or Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox. However, none of those other competitors seemed to be trying very hard, pushing drastically overpriced products, and generally offering few compelling reasons to buy into their ecosystems. Outfits like SNK with their Neo-Geo platform or Hudson with their TurboGrafX platform failed to compete and ultimately faded away into shadows of their former selves. Yet their loss did no harm to Console Gaming as a whole. Even when Sega decided to get out of hardware after the back-to-back failures of the Saturn and Dreamcast, and instead transition into a third-party publisher, the Industry barely felt it. So why would the exit of Xbox be any different?
Ultimately, when one competitor exits a market, while it does offer an opening for the other entrenched competitors to make their products and services worse – if they weren’t enthusiastically doing that already – it also opens up space for new competitors to step-in. We’ve already seen Valve expressing extreme interest in entering the console space, and as a private – not beholden to shareholders – company, Valve has been able to push the angle of providing the best goods and services they can, rather than continually enshittifying their goods and services while simultaneously raising prices. If “competition” is supposed to keep players in the Free Market honest, then letting the worst, least-competitive players fail their way out of the market, pointing out price fixing and collusion when it’s obvious, and giving market share to new competitors who actually deliver what the customer wants is not just an option, it’s a duty.
