Why Xbox's President Thinks TikTok Is A Bigger Competitor Than PlayStation

Since the bombshell announcement of new Halo installment coming to PlayStation just two days ago, the wider public seems convinced that Xbox's battle in the console war is over. And now, comments made by Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty seem to be lending credence to that, declaring TikTok a bigger competitor to Xbox than PlayStation. There's still a hint of contradictory information at play here, like leaks pointing toward the next-gen Xbox being a PlayStation 6 (and wallet) killer, but mostly it really does seem that Microsoft via Xbox is embracing its role as the industry's largest game publisher since its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard and its subsidiaries. If "every screen is an Xbox", then, it was only a matter of time until Halo made its way onto a PlayStation console. Afterall, Microsoft needs to make that $69 billion USD back sooner or later, and a sale is a sale. 


But oh, how times have changed for the Xbox brand. When Xbox entered the scene in 2001, it was doing so following in the footsteps of Sega's Dreamcast as a competitor against Nintendo and Sony PlayStation with next-generation online connectivity features and Windows-adjacent development features (WindowsCE support on Dreamcast, and Xbox leveraging DirectX). Xbox's controller layout, even, carries over the Dreamcast and Sega consoles more-so than Nintendo or PlayStation, and some Dreamcast sequels like Jet Set Radio Future remain exclusive to the original Xbox hardware to this day. While Xbox's strong launch pulled it ahead of Nintendo in its generation, Xbox only led the console market with its early start on the sixth-gen Xbox 360, and still lost millions when the Red Ring of Death fiasco struck Xbox 360 hardware. But since the pre-launch backlash against Xbox One, Microsoft's console ambitions have never truly recovered—and now, it seems PlayStation has been crowned the final winner of the "console wars" in the traditional sense, with Nintendo technically getting more sales but long foregoing direct competition with Sony and Microsoft, by its own admission.

A Statement from GameStop pic.twitter.com/GraJAT69aI

— GameStop (@gamestop) October 25, 2025

Even the likes of GameStop have declared the console wars officially over, though there are still some things worth mentioning. For example, while Nintendo also doesn't consider itself to be directly competing with PlayStation and Xbox, it still prioritizes its business model around exclusive games made solely for its hardware, taking a militaristic legal approach against emulation and fan games made for other platforms. And while most of the space is playfully ragging on Microsoft for effectively turning itself into a third-party publisher—a "New Sega", if you will—PlayStation has actually been porting major exclusives to PC for a long while, too, just not back over to Xbox. Nintendo now seems to be the sole holdout unwilling to bring its titles outside the walls of its garden in any capacity.

As Matt Booty declared in an exclusive statement to The New York Times, "Our biggest competition isn't another console. We are competing more and more with everything from TikTok to movies." This means the new front on which the console war is being fought is not directly in the marketplace with hardware vs hardware—it's now a matter of how gaming can win eyes, ears, and time from other sources of entertainment in our modern attention economy.

With kids and teens absorbed in TikTok, or somehow simultaneously absorbed in TikTok and Minecraft, and truly focused on neither, I'd say gaming as a whole is fighting an uphill battle against forms of mass-produced micro-entertainment that may never be truly won.