At the CCXP in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at the end of last year, Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft's games business, said that Microsoft was working with partners to launch a mobile game app store as part of an "important strategy." Now that these words are becoming a reality, Sarah Bond, vice president of Microsoft's Xbox gaming division, has confirmed that it will launch the Xbox mobile game store, and even gave a specific time of July 2024.
This means that users of Android and iOS devices no longer need to subscribe to Game Pass Ultimate and use cloud gaming to experience Xbox games. Previously, Spencer said, "We want to be able to make Xbox and our and our third-party partners' content available on any screen that someone wants to play." We can't do that on mobile devices today, but we want to build a world where we think these devices will be open", and now that the EU's Digital Markets Act is finally about to become a reality, Microsoft is ready to challenge Google and Apple on mobile.
The Digital Markets Act forced Apple and Google to change the way they distribute apps on mobile devices, which was key to Microsoft's ability to develop a gaming app store. More importantly, Microsoft finally completed the acquisition of Activision Blizzard last fall. Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which previously had no substantial presence in the mobile gaming space, brings much-needed capabilities in mobile game development, marketing, and advertising. But before the Activision Blizzard acquisition, Microsoft had little presence on mobile, which meant that the gaming giant lacked the influence to the developers involved.
With Activision Blizzard, Microsoft can put an end to popular IPs under the former such as Call of Duty Mobile, Diablo Immortal, and Candy Crush Saga, and attract a large number of mobile gamers to use the Xbox mobile game store. Therefore, when everything is ready, it is only a matter of course, and Microsoft is ready to grab the huge market of 600 billion yuan for mobile games.
It's just that this time Microsoft's Xbox mobile game store may not be what many friends imagined. It is reported that the Xbox mobile game store will not be a native app, but "use network distribution", which some industry insiders interpret as Microsoft's preparation for the launch of a PWA app.
PWAs, on the other hand, are actually cross-platform web applications that allow users to install web pages as apps on their phones. That is to say, if users open the Xbox mobile game store in the future and find a game they are interested in, they will eventually download the corresponding installation file in the App Store, Google Play Store, or by sideloading.
After all, for Microsoft, in addition to targeting mobile gamers to promote Xbox games on mobile, the more important point is "Xbox Play Anywhere", that is, allowing players to play Xbox games on as many devices as possible, which is also Microsoft's theme in the gaming business in the past few years. The essence of Xbox Play Anywhere is to focus on XGP, which means that players can play wherever they want as long as they purchase an XGP subscription service. Therefore, in the past few years, behind Microsoft's vigorous promotion of cloud gaming and other actions, it is actually to lower the threshold of games as much as possible, so as to increase the number of users of subscription services.
If there is cloud gaming, Microsoft can actually ignore mobile completely. After all, at that time, mobile phones will be just a portable "screen" for Microsoft, and players will not even need an external controller to experience Xbox games based on cloud services. Unfortunately, cloud gaming has struggled to land yet, and even Microsoft's size can't solve the problem of uneven global network quality, let alone make the game run on servers thousands of miles away, and then the latency is very similar to that of running locally.
Although cloud gaming has not yet met Microsoft's expectations, the massive mobile player base is clearly objective, so Microsoft must also find ways to reach this group of users. It is definitely impossible to go through the App Store/Google Play Store, because the Xbox hardware is already being subsidized, and Microsoft's game business profits are basically in the game sales themselves. If Xbox games are distributed to players around the world through the App Store, it does save Microsoft the trouble of building infrastructure, but at the cost of contributing 30% of Apple's commission, which is equivalent to Microsoft "working" for Apple or Google.
As for why Microsoft chose not to develop a native app store, this is indeed a puzzling question. After thinking about it, the only possibility is that Microsoft is still not confident in challenging the App Store/Google Play Store, and is not ready to publicly tear up with Google and Apple for the time being, after all, it is still vivid that Epic Games was jointly banned by Apple and Google. Due to the lack of hardware foundation on the mobile side, once Microsoft's Xbox mobile game store is boycotted by Google and Apple, the result is likely to be the shattering of its strategic dream of entering the mobile terminal.
Therefore, Microsoft's current attitude towards the Xbox mobile game store is to use it as a publicity channel to help developers promote games, let players find high-quality games, and through this more gentle way, let Google and Apple accept the reality of new players entering the mobile game market.