What happens now for Xbox’s mobile ambitions?
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It’s the end of an era at Microsoft. This week the games division descended into chaos with sweeping layoffs, game cancellations, a studio closure, and a frankly terrible communications strategy.
You can read our coverage of the layoffs here, as well as the end of Warcraft Rumble development here. In this piece, I’ll focus on the state of play of the Xbox mobile strategy. You can expect more analysis on the Week in Mobile Games podcast.
Play anywhere
Xbox has evolved into a vision of “play anywhere”. The problem with this is that having mobile as a part of this strategy doesn’t work when the company is built toward high-end console triple-A blockbusters. Microsoft isn’t building mobile-first, free-to-play cross-platform games like Genshin Impact purposely built for all devices.
And there is evidence that simply bringing top triple-A console titles to mobile doesn’t work. Capcom has thrown the Resident Evil franchise onto the App Store to complete failure. The series has made a combined $2.6m in gross revenue on iOS, according to AppMagic estimates.
The games Microsoft makes simply don’t fit on mobile devices. Meanwhile, cloud gaming hasn’t taken off and there is no breakout moment in sight.
A strategy of high-end and low-end hardware from the get go with the Series X and Series S hamstrings developers. Combined with the strategy of being available anywhere, cloud gaming, and now a side-handheld business makes Xbox a jack of all trades and a master of none.
The mobile games
The future for Microsoft’s mobile plans looks bleak. It has ended development on Warcraft Rumble, which was ultimately a long-term failure despite a strong opening salvo. Last year Mighty Doom developer Alpha Dog was closed, while this week Bloomberg reports that the company has laid off 10% of staff at King, accounting for approximately 200 staff.
King was a cash cow for Activision prior to its $69bn sale. In its Q2 2023 financials, the mobile division accounted for 51% of the publisher’s net revenue at $943m. The company does have smaller titles in its portfolio that arguably don’t fit with a firm making multi-billion dollar blockbusters like Candy Crush Saga, but making cuts to such a profitable division is a worrying sign.
There could be a future in some mobile adaptations through partnerships. Call of Duty: Mobile, with the help of Tencent, has been a billion-dollar+ success story.
By default Microsoft has become one of the world’s largest mobile publishers – but King will be hard pushed to successfully adapt Xbox IP to mobile.
King’s own Call of Duty game disappeared, Crash Bandicoot: On The Run failed, and it has a litany of midcore titles over the years that never made it to global launch. Outside of King, the internally developed Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile, seemingly created as a move to cut out its Tencent partnership, was also a failure.
As I’ve noted a number of times on the Week in Mobile Games podcast, it was strange to see Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer publicly stating how King was one of the key reasons for making the deal happen. He told The Verge back in 2022 that mobile is “a place where if we don’t gain relevancy as a gaming brand, over time the business will become untenable”.
Unless it’s adapting its entire portfolio for mobile, it’s hard to see where success comes from. A step back from mobile would be in-step with PlayStation’s vanishing mobile plans and Nintendo’s last internally-developed release being Mario Kart Tour in 2019.
Marketplace plans
Last year, Xbox president Sarah Bond announced during a Bloomberg Live talk that the Xbox mobile games marketplace was coming to the web in July 2024. A year later, we’re still waiting. Not only that, there’s a dearth of public details on what exact form this store will take.
The company has previously blamed Apple for its failure to launch. It’s true that the iPhone giant has done everything it can to make it all but impossible for companies like Microsoft to have a reasonably profitable business through iOS. But it’s ultimately a shield for a business that will struggle.
The recent court ruling in the US that has cracked open the App Store actually makes it tougher for alternative marketplaces to find success. If publishers can tap into the App Store’s enormous store that consumers are familiar with, where they have built a habit around this being the place to find and install new apps, what is the incentive to join another marketplace? Web shops and direct-to-consumer strategies seem far more effective for the bottom line.
Alternative app stores can still be successful to a degree – but it’s surely not a space the multi-trillion dollar Microsoft has any business in. The Epic Games Store has surpassed 40m installs – way off its target of 100m (albeit hampered again by platform holders). For Fortnite, the investment is arguably worth it to capture more revenue from sales (though the US court ruling currently makes this somewhat moot). But it’s unlikely Epic will take meaningful market share when even Samsung with its own devices has failed to do so.
Microsoft can’t offer better terms than DTC, only better discovery for mobile games. And for its own portfolio, as titles like Resident Evil show, unless Xbox builds games truly meant for cross-platform play, which really requires a mobile-first mindset, there’s little incentive for players to play Xbox games on mobile either.
It’s hard to see a true path forward for Xbox on mobile outside of some external partnerships. Internally. King will do its own thing, potentially dragged down by the mothership.
Mobile is a distraction for Xbox where there isn’t a clearly thought out plan to bring it all together, and it’s a platform that has been summarily ditched by its more focused console rivals.
