As Paul Tassi writes for Forbes, there’s no two ways around it – Xbox One launched as a mess and as a result, Microsoft has never been able to get the traction it did with Xbox 360 despite all the positive momentum it had against Sony.

 This topic is unavoidably going to turn into a fanboy minefield in short order, but the narrative is pretty clear. Sony is doing a great job cultivating high-quality exclusive sequels from its storied franchises, but also creating new IPs that are must-have games. This is in contrast to Nintendo, which always produces solid first-party titles, but lacks most everything that’s third-party multiplatform, and Xbox, which still has a few core exclusive franchises, but they’re not what they once were, and Microsoft is almost more likely to cancel new exclusive IPs than see them to completion at this point.

There are many stories about how Sony got this far out in front of its competition this generation, and the most common tale is how Microsoft botched the reveal and rollout of the Xbox One at launch, first messing around with the idea of an “always-on console” that possibly was going to use discs as mere licenses, but even after scrapping that idea, still launching at a higher price with less power and marrying the system to an albatross called “Kinect 2.0.” 

One of the smartest things Sony has ever done is to invest in top first party studios, something Microsoft has never given much thought to.

 Microsoft has certainly produced some good games. I loved Halo 5, and was satisfied with Gears of War 4. ReCore is creative and Forza always fills the racing niche better than its rivals. I think Sunset Overdrive was a promising new IP that didn’t get enough love. Dead Rising and State of Decay are uh, adequate zombie franchises.

But the list sort of peters out there, and the only game there I would actually consider can’t-miss is probably Halo. If you flip to Sony, you have Until Dawn, Uncharted 4, Bloodborne, The Last Guardian, Nioh and Horizon Zero Dawn, with The Last of Us 2 and God of War 4 up ahead. And most of these aren’t just good. Many of the released titles are Game of the Year contenders in some capacity, which is something I don’t think anyone has said lately about Gears 4 or Halo Wars 2 outside of die-hard Xbox fans. 

Internal studios aside, level of freedom is another reason why developers stick to working with Sony and in many cases, might get first pass at titles as well.

 Sony, meanwhile, still has Naughty Dog itself working on sequels like Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us 2. Rather than trying to recapture the magic of past games, they’re instead trying to top themselves, and in the case of Uncharted and Nathan Drake, they know when to call it a day. 

Sony also does not have a problem encouraging its partners and in-house developers to work on whatever the hell they want to work on. That’s how you get Bloodborne from the Souls series’ FromSoftware, or Until Dawn from LittleBigPlanet helper Supermassive, or Horizon Zero Dawn from Killzone’s Guerrilla. While it’s unclear if this is exactly how this played out, it stands to reason that say, Bungie wanted to work on something new with Destiny, but Microsoft valued Halo more than it did Bungie, so it didn’t pay Bungie enough to stay and it went to Activision. While Microsoft got to keep Halo, it’s missing out on exclusive access to one of the most beloved new IPs of this generation as a result.

Speaking of Destiny, PS4 players will once again gain access to an exclusive Destiny 2 Beta as well as additional content like they did with the original title.

 As mentioned before, it feels like Microsoft is cancelling more new exclusives than it’s making these days, from Phantom Dust to Scalebound to Fable Legends. It’s entirely possible these games would not have turned out well, but while developers seem to be thriving when working with Sony, they wilt under Microsoft. This leads to awkward partnerships like Microsoft paying to make Rise of the Tomb Raider a year-long exclusive, believing that’s enough exclusivity to even put Lara Croft on their Xbox packaging as one of its “icons” alongside Master Chief, Marcus Fenix and uh, a Forza car. That image alone more or less sums up the entire exclusivity issue here (also note the canceled Fable Legends on there). 

With PS4 sales ahead of Xbox One twofold and gaming being a very small part of Microsoft, the polar opposite for Sony with PlayStation bringing in the bulk of their profits, it’s hard to see Microsoft pivoting and really get behind their gaming division. For Sony, they need PlayStation but for Microsoft who made a huge push in entertainment during the Xbox 360 era (which is why Xbox One stumbled so much with its TV features and NFL packages that never led anywhere), gaming is almost a distraction. Sure Microsoft lost out on mobile and yes Windows is in decline but under current CEO Satya Nadella, they smartly pivoted to cloud computing and services via Azure which brings in billions of dollars for them each quarter. Unfortunately for Xbox, that path has little to do with them outside of vague feature sets like driving better visuals through cloud processing, which was set to be a major differentiator between Xbox One and PS4 but never really materialized. On the other hand, Xbox also offers little to advance Microsoft’s server and cloud ambitions which are at the core of the company now.

All this should make for an interesting E3 this year, at which we’ll surely learn a lot more about Xbox Scorpio, their take on PS4 Pro which is set to launch in late 2017. But short of tons of exclusives and silent projects being worked on at Microsoft and other studios, it’s hard to see how they catch up to Sony and outside of ego, I don’t see why Microsoft should bother to continue pouring money into Xbox.