By Nelson Schneider - 03/15/26 at 03:36 PM CT
All of the news last year was pointing to a final winding down of the long-running console wars, with PC and Mobile gaming as the ultimate winners. With Sony allegedly cooling on hardware sales and wishing to pivot into developing “community,” Xbox seeming to throw all of its resources into the “Everything is an Xbox” campaign, and even Nintendo’s Switch 2 sales cratering after a strong Launch Window, it looked like all of the major players in console gaming (and Xbox – LOL, Xbox) were ready to disappear into the long night.
Alas, those of us who were looking forward to Unified Gaming may have counted our chickens before they were laid, as early 2026 has seen a spate of bad news that seems to have reversed everything we thought we knew was coming.
First, in a surprise move, Xbox fired both Phil Spencer and his presumed successor and protege, Sarah Bond, only to replace them with an executive with no gaming experience who used to be part of Microsoft’s AI division, Asha Sharma. Sharma then doubled-down on the future of Xbox hardware still being a thing, which resulted in the reveal of a logo for the next Xbox, codenamed Helix. Coincidentally, all references to the “Everything is an Xbox” ad campaign that Spencer and Bond pushed so heavily has quietly disappeared since Sharma ascended to the throne. Rumors and alleged leaked specs for the Helix make it sound like it’s going to be a $1000+ dream machine with 48GB of RAM and a custom AMD system-on-a-chip that combines a top-tier APU with a new AI-empowering NPU, that runs the Windows 11 Full-Screen Experience and can play PC games and has full backward compatibility with all four Generations of Xbox games. Of course, even when Microsoft finally follows the path I’ve been dictating to them for years, they manage to get that Monkey’s Paw corruption in there somehow: Apparently when Microsoft says the Xbox Helix can play “PC games,” it actually means that it can play UWP (or whatever Microsoft is calling their “modern” proprietary Windows Store app ecosystem after the official deprecation of “UWP” in 2019) games sold in the Windows Store, which means it will have NO traction in the PC gaming community, since we all know the Windows Store is a complete dumpster fire.
Next, in a rumor-fueled article by worthless hack journalist and sorceress-boob-hater, Jason Schreier, it came to light that Sony is not happy with the performance of its efforts to port its first-party games to Steam and GOG, and has decided to end the practice, with newer titles like “Ghost of Yotei,” “Astrobot,” and the upcoming “Wolverine” by Insomniac never getting a non-PlayStation release. Apparently, Sony only made about $1.5 billion over the entire 5+ year duration of their PC porting experiment, while they make over $4.5 billion PER YEAR just on PS+ subscriptions and holding their “community” hostage. It also seems that the bad reaction by PC gamers to having to sign up for a free PlayStation Network account in order to play some of these PlayStation ports (like “Helldivers 2”) may have awakened Sony to the fact that they will NEVER be able to wring PS+ money out of the PC sector the same way they do with their PlayStation ecosystem, which was probably the plan for “building community” all along.
Finally, after a brisk Launch Window in which the Switch 2 sold insanely well, sales cratered at the end of its first year as players seemed to realize that none of the new exclusive games were all that great or numerous enough to warrant a $70 purchase. That all changed with the release of “Pokemon Pokopia,” which sold out of full-priced “physical” copies rapidly, in spite of several evil caveats. First, Nintendo went on the record, promising that only third-party games would be sold via its fake physical media key-card system. “Pokemon Pokopia” is a Nintendo-published game created via a collaboration between Game Freak (a second party) and Tecmo-Koei (a third-party that has worked directly on Nintendo IP in the past, such as with ‘Hyrule Warriors’), yet, in spite of the game being less than 10GB and thus able to fit on even the cheapest tier of Switch 2 cartridges, the “physical” version was shipped exclusively via key-cards. This is just the type of vindication that Nintendo will use to justify even more evil and anti-customer, anti-preservation policies in the future.
And there we have it! A year’s worth of bad news about the undead future of console gaming, all crammed into about a month-and-a-half. Xbox isn’t dead. Sony isn’t going to become a big third-party publisher on PC, and Nintendo is going to continue adopting Worst Practices within their ecosystem until they can compete with EA for the title of Most Evil Corporation of the Year, and quite possibly win. And the worst part about all this is that all three of these companies are so close to doing the right thing, but they just can’t and won’t because enshittification is more profitable than actually serving the customer in our hopelessly broken modern economy.
*sigh*
