In the console wars that we have now, the “winners” of the year are without a doubt determined by console sales and the games that were released on the system. To that end, Sony is the likely winner of the year because of games like God of War, Spider-Man and more, with Nintendo a close second with Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Pokemon Let’s Go, and more. And some would say that it’s the other way around, but no one would argue that Xbox One deserves to be at the top slot, because their gaming palette was thin.
In fact, the only “exclusives” that the Xbox One “had” in 2018 was Sea of Thieves, State of Decay 2, and Forza Horizon 4, and all three of those also came out on PC, which means they weren’t actually exclusive.
This led to an interesting stat by Metacritic, who is doing a recap of 2018 in terms of who did what, as they revealed the the Xbox One had ZERO positively reviewed exclusives in 2018. PS4 had 13, Nintendo had done, and the PC had 33.
“Microsoft failed to offer a compelling case to pick up an Xbox One rather than another console in 2018,” writes Metacritic. “The best ‘console exclusive’ titles released for XB1 last year could also be played on your PC, and there wasn’t a single game exclusive to Xbox One alone that received positive reviews from critics.”
Microsoft didn’t have a total failure of a year for Xbox One though, as they did sell consoles, especially on Black Friday, and they seemed to acknowledge their lack of exclusives and started buying up studios to help them make games. But, even if those studios are going to be producing games for their next console, that still leaves this generation to wonder what else the One is going to offer, if anything at all.
