Phil Spencer has revealed what he thinks needs to happen for video game consoles, like the Xbox, to have multiple video game stores selling games separately.

This may seem a fanciful idea at the moment, but that may no longer be the case in a matter of months. That’s because the EU has come out with new regulations mandating that Apple and Google open up their devices to third party stores and sideloading. In fact, the wording from the EU doesn’t specify it’s just for phones and tablets. While the big console companies haven’t confirmed that EU is forcing them to follow these rules too, they may be confirming it soon enough.

Microsoft being an open platform, it’s the most popular example for a place where different video game stores exist and thrive. Steam, GOG, itchio, and Zoom Platform all exist to sell games to consumers of all kinds.

On top of that, there are game studios that sell games they and other companies make. EA, Ubisoft,  Activision Blizzard, Rockstar Games, and Epic Games all have their individual game stores. Many individual games, such as Genshin Impact and League of Legends, also run their own stores, for currencies and content that is exclusive to said games.

Video game consoles have not been as open as a rule. Game companies, as a rule, design their consoles in such a way that they can only play games licensed by the company itself.

An odd exception to this rule was the Mattel Intellivison and the Colecovision in the 1980s. Mattel’s and Coleco’s platforms did have their own games. Whoever, they bought sold special adapters, that allowed users to also play Atari’s own games from the Atari 2600 on them as well. Atari sued Coleco, but not Mattel. Curiously enough, Atari and Coleco settled, and so there is no real precedent in US law banning consoles from playing video games made by other companies.

Another case of a multiplatform video game console was the Pioneer Laseractive, from 1993. Instead of making their own games, Pioneer entered into business agreements with Sega and NEC for their consoles. As a result, you could buy expansions for the LaserActive that let you play both Sega Genesis games and PC Engine games.

But going even further than that, you could also play Sega CD and PC Engine CD games using the LaserActive’s disc drive. And then there were the special proprietary LaserDisc games, some of which were made for the Genesis expansion, and others for the PC Engine expansion.  In spite of the grand ambitions of this project, the LaserActive was a commercial failure.

Today it would be considerably easier to make video game consoles multiplatform, if the console companies opened up their consoles to multiple game stores. I am talking about this on a technical level, but of course, the companies might balk at it when they think about the business side of it.

So here is what Phil Spencer thinks about opening up game consoles to have multiple stores in them:

“The challenge with consoles today is the business model around console is selling a device at a loss, and making it up through store revenue and other revenue. There would have to be a change to that model, but I don’t necessarily think that’s bad.

As we look forward, we think about open access to these devices, for different storefronts. Now there’s a much different scale between mobile and consoles, but I think the question about consoles is a valid question. There’s about 1.8 billion players on phones in the world, and there’s about 200 million people that play on console.

So console, just I think in terms of impact in the industry, is much different. But I think you’ll see business model diversity on devices that you play on. That could allow for multiple ways for publishers to get content to their customers.”

It’s both exciting and terrifying to think about what this could mean. What could we possibly be losing if video game consoles open up to multiple storefronts? Are smaller video games more likely to fail because of discoverability issues? Will this unintentionally make video game prices go up, or video game consoles unsustainable? While this could be an exciting prospect we should also not disregard the many ways this regulation could backfire.

We’re not really sure we want to know what would happen or not if it does come to pass.

Source: Second Request Podcast