I voted a little. Even if Starfield turns out to be the game of the generation I don’t think it’ll help them all that much.
They need to release more good/great games that gather hype consistently to really get the ball rolling imo.
Keep telling people that the N64 had GoldenEye, Ocarina of Time, Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Smash Bros... and the N64 largely failed...
Not sure a system had as good a lineup as the N64 and lost significant market share from the previous generation. They lost even more market share with the Gamecube despite getting better 3rd party support.
So no, Starfield isn't going to tangibly help Xbox. There is now a mind-share problem that needs to be resolved. July will be a bad month with NPD/Circana and the Q4 2023 Fiscal Earnings for Xbox. Will be very interesting to see what happens with this July 18th deadline and Activision. It looks like they'll prevent the preliminary injunction, but the hearings for the CAT don't start until after the deadline has passed. It will be interesting to see what the CAT thinks if Microsoft closes despite being blocked.
If the deal with Activision doesn't go through, I don't see any avenue for Microsoft to make any tangible in-roads in mind-share.
I think their model is sufficiently broken and almost purpose-built to prevent mind-share growth. By supporting PC day and date, the Xbox platform is diminished. Anyone with interest in any of these individual games can get them on PC and there is no push to buy either a Series S or Series X to play them.
GamePass on PC makes it worth even less since you don't even have to buy the games on PC, you just subscribe until you beat the games you want and then unsubscribe for considerably less money. For 30 dollars you can play Starfield for 3 months on PC. That's extremely destructive.
They've made an argument that if you even like Microsoft games or Bethesda games, the place to play them is on PC.
You get higher framerates and resolutions, it's cheaper, AND you can play non-Xbox games like FF16 and ultimately many SIE games.