I started gaming seriously during a time when you were either a Sega kid or a Nintendo kid, full stop. NES or Master System. Genesis or SNES. Blood code Mortal Kombat or ‘E for Everyone’ sweat. There was no in-between, because nobody I knew owned both consoles, and on the playground, you had to choose sides. The console war was serious as blowing into cartridges or renting games from Blockbuster on Fridays, and we were the willing, passionate soldiers. No conscription here, only the voluntary battle of Yoshi’s Cookie versus Altered Beast.
Hell, even later on, when I acquired a PlayStation in 1995, I had routine (and playful, admittedly) disagreements with an acquaintance at school about what current console was superior. He’d gotten a 3DO the year prior, and we know how that ultimately turned out, but it was fun verbally sparring over games of kickball. Hey, at least the 3DO had Gex as a timed exclusive, and don’t forget the enduring classic Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties.
My point is, for as long as I’ve been playing video games, such platform tribalism has existed. Whether or not you think this is a healthy or productive use of people’s time is up to you, but us humans do tend to turn literally everything into exclusionary competition, and we sure love to ‘other’ the humans who aren’t in our tribe.
It’s imperative that we fight against this dark urge, in my opinion, and as of very recently, Microsoft has leaned into ending the long-standing console war for good. A peace treaty, if you will. Is it out of altruism? Nah. It’s out of sheer survival, probably.
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I heard Colin Moriarty comment once, and I think it was in an episode of his podcast Constellation, that maybe Xbox has inadvertently fallen into an advantageous and possibly future-proof position by, well, failing in some sense. I’m inclined to agree. Following slowing hardware sales and a move into cross-platform publishing, Xbox games have slowly started to trickle onto the other guys’ machines, namely PlayStation, and it seems like a glimpse of gaming’s inevitable future.
Huge and previously Xbox-exclusive properties like Minecraft, Sea of Thieves and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are now playable on PS5, as well as Doom: The Dark Ages, Oblivion Remastered and Forza Horizon 5. The excellent South of Midnight hasn’t hit PS5 just yet, but I’m sure it’s on the way, given Microsoft’s no-boundaries ‘This is an Xbox’ publishing strategy. Then there’s Gears of War: Reloaded, a remastered port of the original 2006 game, which is coming to PS5 in late summer of this year. Halo, arguably the ultimate Xbox IP, can’t be far behind.
I’ve been playing a good deal of Xbox racer Forza Horizon 5 on PS5, and boy was it a strange feeling logging into my Microsoft account through the PlayStation Network. But also, it felt like… it’s about damn time. We’re finally reaching a point wherein it doesn’t matter which arbitrary box you’re playing a particular game on. All that matters is that you’re playing the game, and that’s a really beautiful thing.
Forza Horizon 5 on PS5 is essentially the same experience it was (and is) on Xbox hardware and PC, which is to say you’ve got a premium racing game to blast through, packed with an insane amount of content to explore, including cool Hot Wheels stuff. I will say that the DualSense offers some noteworthy haptic feedback in this particular version, and the resistance of the triggers adds an extra and welcome dimension to Horizon’s already tight controls.
Controller preference might be the only argument left when it comes to platform preference, I’d wager, and I do prefer the DualSense to the Xbox controller. But now I have a choice: I can play Forza Horizon 5 on Xbox or PlayStation or PC now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it graced Nintendo’s upcoming Switch 2 at some point. The new console could certainly handle it, even if developers had to dumb down the graphics a smidge.
Xbox’s extension to PlayStation has honestly upended my outdated gaming worldview, and in the best possible way. I’d already sort of abandoned such nonsense in recent years, because the console wars were never actually real to begin with. It was all marketing, and marketing is stupid. You can quote me on that. Spread it around Twitter where the console wars are still kept alive via delusion, sadness and regressive human thinking.
But back to what I said earlier, about how Xbox may have accidentally raced ahead of the pack, and what Colin said in his podcast. I do believe the future of gaming lies in platform agnosticism, and this is a huge step in that direction, hopefully. I’m sure, in ten years, we’ll look back at the notion of console exclusivity, and walled-garden platforms by association, as archaic and silly. I already do, in most respects. So the fact that Xbox games are now free to land on any platform might be a harbinger of things to come, and this could give Microsoft a foundational head-start in the race toward a different future.
One day, I bet, all the big gaming publishers will have their titles on most available hardware, and in most major thriving software ecosystems. The battle won’t be fought with boxes anymore, but rather with art and on its merits alone, and maybe that’s how it should be. Sure, hardware will still play a vital role in how we play games, and products like convenient handhelds (portable Xbox?!) will continue to exist, alongside under-TV boxes that run games. But the days of the true console wars seem numbered, and thank God. Plus, as game streaming gets better and better, the hardware itself will become less and less relevant.
If you haven’t played Horizon 5 yet, and you own a PlayStation, it’s a great time to try a fantastic game. The visuals are impeccable, the open-world map is enormous and the soundtrack is very solid. We’re talking Beastie Boys, The Killers, The Struts and even The Offspring, which can sometimes give the game a retro Crazy Taxi vibe. And while you’re playing, know that you’re participating in the evolution of an industry that continues to give us waves of amazing interactive expression, now increasingly without the annoying guardrails of exclusivity.
