There’s never been an easier time to boycott Xbox

When I talk to other journalists and random bus stop strangers about the idea of divesting from Microsoft and Xbox – worth doing for many reasons besides the company’s dealings with the Israeli military – there is often an air of learned helplessness, a kind of deer-in-headlights mentality. Microsoft’s gaming biz is too huge to ignore. They own so much. They own a lot of the malarkey that gets eyeballs. Which I can confirm, based on day-to-day experience of traffic stats. Still, I would argue that they do not have any momentum with the things they own, and to be frank, a fair whack of their stuff does sod-all traffic for us. Microsoft today are institutionally incapable of being intriguing. As such, an extremely indulgent way of thinking about the BDS boycott is to treat it as positive encouragement to seek intrigue elsewhere.

Last week’s Xbox showcase was a banner day for advocates of the idea that Microsoft’s gaming business is a zombie, after thousands of layoffs in the face of a landscape transformed by fever dreams about productivity gains and the ‘democratisation of art’ under ChatGPT – a brave new world of acute component shortages in which the $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard starts to feel like buying up horse stables in 1908. Admittedly, a more basic reason for the show being so short of excitement is that Microsoft are keeping the powder dry for their next Xbox console, which isn’t far away from a proper reveal. But still, what a crock of diminishing returns.

The Halo: Combat Evolved remake, for instance. After some brief flirtation with alternate Spartan leads in Halo 5: Guardians, over 10 years ago, Halo’s franchise leads have disappeared entirely beneath the skirts of Master Chief, even though Master Chief (a deliberately unpersonable relic of the brand mascot era) has long since been overshadowed by marginally more charismatic Action Men in games like God Of War. The argument for another Halo remake is only slightly less laughable than the argument for The Last Of Us: Part 2 Remastered. We already had a Master Chief Collection, Microsoft – I wrote far too much about it as OXM’s online editor in 2013. I did a whole paragraph on the high resolution texture of some sacks!

Similarly, Gears of War: E-Day sees Microsoft abandoning frail efforts to cultivate Gears of War storylines outside of Delta Squad. It’s winding back the gears, de-aging Marcus Fenix like Martin Scorsese running a steam iron over Robert de Niro, and charting the beginnings of the Locust conflict, already heavily alluded to or directly excavated in all of the preceding games. I would never accuse the original Gears of War of being subtle storytelling, but there is something utterly humiliating about the need to make hay out of every halfway elegant possibility intimated by its “destroyed beauty” setting. See that line on the wiki page? You could chuck a whole videogame in there.

Playground’s forthcoming Fable, at least, is unavoidably a departure for a series whose last numbered instalment landed in 2010, but it feels like a departure in the direction of milquetoast everyman role-playing due to “a lack of belief in objective arseholery”, as Mark put it. There is nothing exhilarating here, as yet. It genuinely makes you mourn the cracked pipedreams and calculating earnestness of the Molyneux days. And beyond that, what did Microsoft have? A handful of games that have been in development since forever, like State of Decay 3, a game functionally at odds with its own reveal trailer. A new incarnation of venerable platforming dragon Spyro, now with proper flight mechanics and angrier eyebrows. And then, the usual dutiful flickers of the exotic from Double Fine, developers of the recent Kiln and co-sponsor of Day of the Devs.

If this is a dry year, Microsoft are in the business of dry years. They epitomise the blockbuster publisher mentality that what sells is a flavourful variation on the same, preferably smooshed out into a live service of some kind. They are the Pepsi Vanilla of shooters, car games, and RPGs.

Microsoft do own a bunch of smart and ambitious teams, and have allocated some funding and leeway to relatively unquantifiable projects like, for example, Rare’s Everwild, finally cancelled last year. There are people with appetite and imagination within the walls. But their executive “custodianship” consists heavily of remastering or remaking dog-eared classics and shovelling them onto more platforms. Their blockbuster sequels are purely additive, another layer of “seasonal content”. Inasmuch as they appear to care about weirder and/or smaller games, it’s because they need to keep Game Pass fed and also, covet Steam’s status as the industry’s bustling bazaar.

It wizens the cartilage to recall that Microsoft are in charge of Arkane, or what’s left of them – Arkane, the studio largely responsible for re-popularising the immersive sim; Arkane, the purveyors of teleportation skills that leave a shower of spent meat behind, and toe-curling phrases such as “tight as a boiled owl”. It shrivels the gizzards to recall that Microsoft hold the keys for Doom – a vehicle for so much adventure in first-person design, nowadays an indifferently gratifying action-RPG full of gore-slicked progression loops and worldbuildingTM. I’m even kind of mad that Microsoft own Call of Duty, whose more experimental periods – the crafty framing and scripting of the original Modern Warfare, the carnivalesque implosions of Black Ops 3 – are a distant memory.

Above all, I’m ticked off that Microsoft own Minecraft. 12 years on, they have so far not ruined it, despite some skin-crawling cash-in pitches from people outside the Xbox team. They’ve kept the fussy Java edition alive and maintained cordial relations with many thousands of modders. There is goodwill there. But nor have Microsoft done anything very interesting with Minecraft – and I say that as the sometime freelance co-author of an “official”, i.e. sponsored history of the game. They’ve merely hastened its transformation into a platform. The imperial core of Minecraft today is an emporium, a realm of #content creators, endless texture packs and Hollywood adaptations ruled by fan fiat, and there is a horrible question mark hanging over the future relationship between Minecraft and generative AI, Microsoft’s latest, insatiable golden goose.

Absolutely none of this is a real argument for joining the BDS campaign against Microsoft, following the discovery of extensive Azure partnerships with the Israeli military during the latter’s invasion and devastation of Gaza, where tens of thousands have died and millions still live under threat of bombing and starvation. We’ve done some reporting on the subject; if you’re looking for an updated account of the situation, here’s one from No Escape. The rationale for joining the boycott is to discourage a large company’s indirect participation in an on-going massacre, classified by UN and human rights groups as a genocide.

Still, I have been feeling the urge to belabour the point that deleting Microsoft’s games from your life is a tiny sacrifice. Xbox today is a clump of stagnant brands granted vast but not indefinite latitude by the profits of the wider business. And for all their scale, for all the clever people and worlds they’ve steadily annexed, Microsoft are still just a very small part of an enormous and diffuse culture that manifests dozens of strange and lovely videogames every week.

In terms of what does traffic, there are any number of loopy survival sims, cult MMOs, modding scenes, bizarro horror efforts, preservation projects, and player-owned servers that are both worthy of scrutiny and a source of potential readers. For every shiny rerun Microsoft publish, there are a dozen, more adventurous alternatives – instead of Minecraft, try Lucid Blocks or Vintage Story. Instead of Halo, try Marathon or Cicadamata. The field contains multitudes and it has no centre. If the BDS boycott is about seeking justice for people living under violent oppression, a trivial but worthwhile impact within videogame culture could be to stop Microsoft living rent-free in our brains.