Not everyone thinks the days of dedicated console hardware are numbered, because according to a former Blizzard Entertainment executive, the opposite is true.

Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard Entertainment, took to Twitter to say that he believes consoles are alive and well and that only those who profit from them are pushing the dying narrative. It was meant as a veiled jab at his former employer Microsoft, which acquired Activision Blizzard King, and the Redmond tech giant has been cutting Blizzard’s staff.

Ybarra spoke about Sony’s strategy of winning if either company wants to be a winner in the living room, so he believes the direction of exclusive games is the way to go. Sony not only knows how to make successful games, but also how to differentiate PlayStation Studios’ products from other games, and he sees this as ultimately paying off for Sony. If he were in Sony’s shoes, Ybarra would pursue this strategy with double the energy.

One respondent wrote that the narrative is different today, that the future is not in the living room, and that the days of consoles are numbered. Ybarra replied that consoles are immortal and that losing companies push this narrative, and that Microsoft’s strategy on consoles and exclusives has been confusing lately, creating a lot of uncertainty for the public (and publishers) as some titles are still Xbox exclusives (Starfield) and others are announced as multiplatform (DOOM: The Dark Ages).

Sony is also very good at bringing in exclusives from outside developers. Square Enix has done this with Final Fantasy XVI (coming soon to PC, we wrote about that) and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, but the publisher is also opening up to a multiplatform strategy. In any case, the next generation of consoles will be out in two or three years, and who knows if Microsoft will still be pushing the death narrative…

Source: WCCFTech