Pushing Buttons: The end of the toxic 'console war' between Xbox and PlayStation

Microsoft's big Xbox announcement last week turned out to be something of an anticlimax: just four games, none of them particularly earth-shattering, are making their way to PlayStation or Nintendo Switch in the near future. Microsoft is neither exiting the console market nor taking all its games multiplatform, as whipped-up rumour mongers had wildly speculated. And the (excellent value) Xbox Game Pass subscription service is remaining exclusive to Xbox and PC. Microsoft was already one of the biggest publishers on PlayStation, especially now that it owns both Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard: everything from Skyrim to Call of Duty to Minecraft is technically a Microsoft game. If Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer had announced that, say, last year's Starfield was headed to PlayStation 5, or Xbox head Sarah Bond had said that Microsoft was ditching the idea of Xbox-exclusive games altogether, well, that would have been a huge shift worthy of writing home about (or, in my case, writing to you about).