Xbox fan backlash to "PlayStation logos in the Showcase" isn't about gatekeeping — it's about distrust

On the most recent Xbox Two Podcast, I found myself and my co-host talking for an odd amount of time about logos.

Unless you're as chronically online as I am, you might be wondering what the f I'm talking about. Well, Xbox CCO Matt Booty caused a small storm on X when he recently confirmed Microsoft will continue showing competitor platforms' logos throughout its Xbox Showcase on June 7.

PlayStation, Switch, and Steam logos will share the stage alongside Xbox, in a move that Microsoft's competitors simply would never do. After, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma came out and admitted that it was an oversight, and they'll re-evaluate future shows.

I'm sure 99% of people don't actually care about this, if they're even aware of it at all. Regardless, it triggered a wave of condemnation from people who are invested in the Xbox ecosystem for a variety of reasons.

Toxicity and fanboyism aside, there's an undercurrent of logic that is lost in the discourse here that I really wanted to highlight. It revolves around the fact that Xbox is often held to different standards than its competitor platforms for one thing, but also because Xbox, and perhaps more accurately Microsoft, no longer has its core audience's trust.

The logos aren't the real story here

There are people out there who are gatekeeping and simply want to dwell deep in the imaginary turf battle that is the console war. But I think for the vast majority, it's less about that, and more about keeping tabs on Microsoft's behavior.

People do not trust that Microsoft has the best intentions for Xbox's future.

Thanks to its "30 by 30" margin goals, Xbox went on a sprint of disastrous, anti-community decisions that blindsided users and upended decades of convention. Master Chief is no longer Xbox's iconic hero, no longer analogous to Nintendo's Mario or PlayStation's Kratos. Instead, it's heading to the PlayStation platform as part of a remaster, which is seen as a symbolic (or perhaps actual) capitulation.

Gamers of a certain age remember players like SEGA and others bowing out of the industry. They also remember Microsoft canceling big services with millions of users, including Skype, Windows Phone, and others. Microsoft isn't a company that needs gaming to survive, particularly so in the AI era. So, fans are notably on edge any and every time Microsoft does something that suggests it wants to quit being a platform holder.

None of Xbox's other competitors would ever dream of doing this, nor does anyone expect or even advocate for them to. And why not? Because it's business logic. PlayStation et. al. want Xbox to die, and they want to take Xbox's users into their own ecosystem.

I've had plenty of conversations with people who assumed various games were exclusive to PlayStation or whatever else purely on the basis that they had acquired exclusive marketing rights. PlayStation famously had a uniquely exclusionary marketing deal for Destiny 2 back in the day, seeing Microsoft pull off some "creative" marketing beats to advertise the game without advertising it directly.

But this is competition. For the core, PlayStation and others project as companies that want to win platform market share. By showcasing the logos of competitors, Xbox is projecting itself as a company that wants to sell software at the expense of its own hardware platform and ecosystem.

For Xbox customers who have invested hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars into this ecosystem — every hint that Microsoft might be moving away from its struggling hardware ecosystem, or is intentionally or unintentionally harming its visibility, is heavily amplified. Fair or not.

The same is true for the exclusives debate. Xbox fans are voting overwhelmingly in favor of Microsoft pulling games out of PlayStation. And it's just pure mathematical logic here: if PlayStation has exclusives, and Xbox doesn't have exclusives, why would potentially new users buy an Xbox? If new users don't keep coming in, doesn't that mean Microsoft will eventually kill Xbox off?

I do think we all, as Xbox customers, could do more to offer more patience to the new Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma. She's only been in the job for a few weeks. But, I ask onlookers within and without Microsoft to know that it was Microsoft itself that created this environment of distrust over what it may or may not do. Years of inconsistency, short-term thinking, and broken promises take their toll.

I am not naïve on this. I know some are just console warring and using the whole thing as an excuse to be toxic online, but for real fans, it's really not about that. Don't blame the customers. They are simply advocating for themselves. It's pure logic, following to the most obvious conclusions.

If Xbox wants to "have its cake and eat it" it needs to prove that its decisions won't lead to the death of Xbox hardware

For what it's worth, I predicted that Surface would be long dead by now a few years ago, but despite it all, Microsoft has kept it going long after I had ever expected it would.

I want to believe that Microsoft knows that it's saving itself a headache by continuing to soldier on with its own hardware endpoints. Google and Apple have effectively locked down and locked Microsoft out of the entire mobile computing paradigm. They might also do the same with artificial intelligence. Whether it's Google's Android desktop experiments, Apple Silicon-powered MacOS, or Valve's SteamOS ... Windows itself has more competition than ever on the horizon, too.

Microsoft cleverly positioned itself further to the back of the stack by becoming the cloud infrastructure provider, powering everything other platforms do — but it's not as if it doesn't have huge competition in that space either.

A lot of Microsoft's software services are bottlenecked by the lack of control it has over endpoints, like iOS and Android. Having a healthy, home-grown ecosystem like Xbox is a moat to insulate itself against this kind of thing. To be fair, CEO Satya Nadella said internally that he is "long on gaming" at a recent town hall ... but it's hard to believe the guy who was all-in on "the metaverse" just a couple of years ago.

Microsoft could do a lot more to show that it's serious in the long term about its own platforms, whether it's stuff like Microsoft Edge, Surface, or indeed, Xbox itself.

The lack of trust is one thing Microsoft desperately needs to work harder to earn back. But we could all do with a bit more patience, too.

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