When it was announced that Halo was coming to Playstation, it didn’t really come as a shock. We’ve been seeing it coming for weeks. What’s more, the news comes weeks after Microsoft announced their new pricing for Game Pass, which faced immense backlash for how high the price was for what was offered in return, and was an obvious attempt to keep the Xbox financially steady.

And through it all, there have been rumors going around of retail outlets no longer stocking Xbox consoles, though it seems that may have been a bit exaggerated.

But still, it seems as though Microsoft is quietly looking for ways to allow Xbox to fail out of the console war, while keeping Xbox alive as a brand. The first not-so-subtle hint was with the “This is an Xbox” ad campaign, which touted the ability of non-Xbox hardware to play Xbox games, which kinda renders an Xbox system itself superfluous.

People are speaking of the console wars as though they’re over, but that’s technically not true, as Sony and Nintendo are still in the race. But the two are so different from one another that they aren’t much seen as direct competitors.

But what’s potentially vexing is that old media, particularly news outlets, might take the Xbox failing out to mean that no one is interested in consoles anymore, even though Playstation 5 has an install base in the tens of millions, and the new Switch 2 is still flying off shelves.

While this can be chalked up to old media being out of touch, the likely reason why corporate media would use Xbox as a bellwether for interest in consoles is because the American company Microsoft is more likely to be a corporate sponsor than Japanese companies such as Sony or Nintendo. It’s another example of the world making more sense when you factor in incentives.

Yet, in the history of video games, a bias against Japanese companies is sadly relevant. When video games were invented, they were an American invention. And for a long while, the American company Atari was the market leader. However, a bunch of poor business decisions on the part of Atari had led to a crash in the video game market, and it was the Japanese company Nintendo, and later the Japanese company Sega, who would step up to the plate.

However, the timing wasn’t altogether great for Nintendo, as Japanese companies, particularly those that made electronics, were widely regarded with suspicion by American lawmakers. The reason? The Japanese economy was thriving, particularly due to Japanese electronics, to the point of Japan briefly becoming the world’s number 2 economy. And there was concern that Japan could have unseated the U.S. as the world’s dominant economy.

This turned out to not be the case. But at the time, it got to the point that American lawmakers expressed their displeasure by publicly destroying Japanese consumer electronics. They also accused Nintendo of price fixing, an accusation which was repeated by the corporate information media, even though the accusation had no weight to it.

By now, you could probably guess it was Democrats.

It was into this environment that Sony came along with their Playstation, further cementing the console market for the Japanese.

By the time Microsoft came along with their Xbox, it was a valid question whether an American company could thrive in a market which was dominated by the Japanese. And, as it turns out, they were able to carve out a niche, for a while. Except in Japan, where Xbox consoles basically just participated.

As far as my opinion of the Xbox goes, it depends on which of their consoles we’re talking about. The first one didn’t interest me. For one thing, it didn’t really have much to play, and while it was consensus that Halo was a great game, it seemed like people said so just because so many other people said so. Microsoft put a lot into Xbox’s X-treme brand image, including partnerships with Mountain Dew and Taco Bell. Coming from any other brand, the cringe would be unreal. But because it’s Microsoft we’re talking about here, the “hello fellow children” vibes were off the charts.

It was against our own better judgment that the original Xbox outsold the GameCube, even if just barely. People really will fall for shallow marketing.

When Microsoft made the Xbox 360, it actually seemed respectable. I still didn’t get one. Putting aside what Nintendo made, which you would go for if you’re a fan of what they do, Microsoft was up against the PS3. Microsoft didn’t do much to differentiate the 360 from the PS3, the latter of which seemed a better choice, even if from the perspective of finding an established brand safer. Also, as much as we picked on the PS3 back in the day, after the slim model was made, it became a great system.

Then there’s Xbox One. It had a great controller, which I’ve used to play PC games up until recently. That’s about it.

And that brings us to the current Xbox consoles, the Xbox Series X/S. I kept forgetting that those ones even existed. Even when talking about video games, it just hardly comes up, even as Xbox failing out of consoles is topical.

As choices, we have Nintendo, who delights us with imaginative interactive worlds and novel hardware features, and we have Sony, whose console is a multimedia powerhouse. Compared to them, Microsoft with their Xbox Series systems are about as fun as an ESG score.

So, what is the future of Xbox? Who knows? Even if it’s hard to imagine them attempting with another console, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to do so, anyway. Remember that Microsoft is the company that got rich, not by making something innovative, but because Bill Gates thought like a lawyer and got a big idea from Xerox. As they are now, Microsoft has a lot more money than sense, and there’s no telling just how much more investors are willing to put up with.

I might have made this comparison before, but Xbox is kind of like that guy who stays seated at a poker table for a long time, not because he’s any good at it (because he’s not), but because he approached the table with an immense pile of chips, and the intermittent victory allows him to convince himself to remain around for just a little while more.

When a Halo game was announced for Playstation, it was as though that poker player started to think he was playing Go Fish, and he let another player take the best card in his hand.