With its powerful consoles, convenient streaming service and huge stable of creative developers, Microsoft’s Xbox brand is arguably as strong as it’s ever been.

Yet at the same time, it’s increasingly shifting away from being a like-for-like competitor to Sony’s PlayStation and towards being a fully-fledged arm of a massive tech giant. That’s reflected in the latest offering Xbox has for players going into the holiday season.

Xbox now publishes games on PlayStation and PC, meaning buying one of its own consoles isn’t a requirement for playing most of its games, and thanks to cloud streaming you don’t technically need a console at all. Microsoft’s aquisition of Activision Blizzard also turbocharged its content machine, giving it instant fuel to push onto mobile devices, develop larger-scale cash cows and expand its Game Pass subscription with the arrival of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which launched last week.

Competitive shooter Call of Duty, which is now owned by Microsoft, is often one of the best-selling games of the year.

At a time when Sony is about to release a more powerful system in the PlayStation 5 Pro, Microsoft has instead created a lower-cost refreshed version of its existing Xbox Series X, which removes the disc drive – a nod to the fact the industry has near-completely shifted to digital downloads. And it continues to sell the far less expensive Series S, which plays all the same games in lower fidelity.

All of Microsoft’s upcoming blockbusters, including this year’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, are expected to be available for Game Pass subscribers on PC and Xbox, but also for purchase on PlayStation and other platforms. Business-wise the strategy seems to be working, with the tech giant’s latest quarterly results showing that while hardware sales are down, overall gaming revenue is up 61 per cent year-on-year.

The Xbox Series X Digital Edition drops the disc drive and around $100, coming in at $700.

The Series X is an incredible console. It has a library spanning 20........

© Brisbane Times