Over the course of the past few weeks—since Horizon: Zero Dawn reviews dropped—many gaming journalists have called for Phil Spencer’s resignation and proclaimed that the Xbox brand is “dead”. Another fallacy they’ve expressed is that Xbox One doesn’t have enough games and somehow, magically, PlayStation 4 has thousands more. Well, let’s analyze this claim.
Operation Supply Drop’s Jeff Bartrom recently looked over IGN lists, various wikis, the Xbox website and other release calendars and discovered that this claim was incorrect. We’ve actually gone to the same sources and verified that these results are accurate give or take 50-100 games between the two consoles because there are certain releases that only occur in certain regions. Taking all of this data into account, Xbox One has 1,055 planned or released games along with 337 backward compatible titles (1,392 total). The PlayStation 4 on the other hand has 1,338 planned or released games. It’s clear that both consoles are neck-and-neck when it comes to games. Given the margin of error I would say the figures are identical.
The claims that PlayStation 4 has an extensive catalog that Xbox One can’t match is erroneous to say the least. Maybe these so-called gaming journalists should bother to do some research and basic math before blurting out their opinions as facts on their websites and social media.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.