Xbox has been in third place behind PlayStation and Nintendo for years now, and the recent wave of Xbox releasing games that would have previously been platform exclusives on PS5 and Nintendo Switch/Nintendo Switch 2 has only further solidified that Xbox isn't trying to move up the ladder; it's just trying to hang on to some level of market share.
And you should expect more ports, according to The Game Business and Circana executive director and video game industry analyst, Mat Piscatella. Piscatella spoke to The Game Business founder and editor-in-chief Christopher Dring about video game and hardware sales for June 2025, which saw the Nintendo Switch 2 become the fastest-selling video game hardware in US history, and, importantly for Xbox, saw Forza Horizon 5 be one of the top-five selling games on PlayStation in the US.
In fact, according to data firm Alinea Analytics, Forza Horizon 5 has become the best-selling game on PS5 for 2025 so far, and that kind of sales success is exactly what Xbox needs right now, even if it has to come from other platforms.
"People who buy a hardware system these days, they’re doing it because of the ecosystem, because of their friends list. You’re not going to get people to transition consoles because of exclusives anymore. We’re way beyond that point," Piscatella told The Game Business. "People are entrenched into their systems. And bringing the content to them is the only way to win. And that is what everyone is doing, except for Nintendo they tend to do their own thing. Even they could benefit from it, but of course they won’t, that’s not their MO."
Piscatella continues to say that because the biggest live service games are so dominant on the charts tracking player engagement, it's key for publishers and game makers to go where players are, and unfortunately for Xbox, the majority of them aren't playing on a Series X/S console.
"In the US at least, the Top Ten live service games suck up half of all gaming time every month, and every other game has got to fight for the remainder. So, bringing that content to where people are is the only way you’re going to be able to win in an environment like we’re looking at right now," Piscatella adds. "Forza being this strong… that’s great. That really bodes well for its next iteration, if they come out day one across systems. Every game finding its way to more stores and ecosystems… that is how you’re going to survive and win."
And it's not just in the US that live service games dominate player engagement. We see it every month in Newzoo's reports, how new releases have the potential to crack the top-10 list of best-selling games, but the top-10 games for player engagement are pretty much always the same, only ever swapping places with each other from time to time.
The fact of the matter is that Xbox has not been able to get players to buy into its platform this console generation, so it's trying to go where players are, instead of trying to convince players to spend hundreds to buy a console to play a new exclusive blockbuster. Even PlayStation has had to lean into the idea of going to where players are, with its recent efforts to port its games to PC. Nintendo is the last platform standing that can still convince players to buy into its platform for exclusive games, and that's probably going to be the case for the foreseeable future.
Dring, for his part, adds that Xbox is "expected" to port more games to Nintendo Switch 2 and PS5 "in the coming weeks," which can be read as a tease for announcements he might have a heads-up on, but it's also just the common-sense expectation to have, as we head into the next wave of announcements with Gamescom 2025 around the corner.
Xbox porting more of its games to other platforms is practically one of the few surefire predictions you could make about the upcoming show and the future of Xbox in the video game industry.
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