For decades, a war has been raging online and in stores. A fight between massive corporations trying to sell you plastic boxes that play games and their weirdly dedicated supporters. The fight was always silly, but very real and expensive, involving massive companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing, game development, and hardware. And for a long time it seemed like the console wars would continue forever. But that’s not what happened.
The conflict has ended. In 2025, it’s all over. You might have missed that because it all didn’t end in a spectacular victory. Instead, the console wars fizzled out for various reasons.
On January 30, Xbox announced plans to bring Forza Horizon 5 to PS5. In doing so, the company essentially gave up one of its biggest console-exclusive franchises to Sony and its PlayStation. This is really strange considering that at one point in time, Sony was Xbox’s bitter competitor.
Xbox dips out of the console war
Internally, before its 2001 launch, the original Xbox was referred to as Project Midway. This was a crass reference to WW2's Battle of Midway. During that battle, American forces decisively defeated Japan’s navy. The name clearly indicated that Microsoft wanted to enter into a video game console war with Nintendo and Sony, and it wanted to win. And for years, Xbox, Sony, and Nintendo battled each other.
One would lower its price, another would launch a new bundle. One would give away free games to subscribers, another would follow suit. Motion controls were copied. Exclusives were secured. It was a very expensive war that had millions of kids around the world bickering on playgrounds over which was better, as teens and adults did the same on internet forums.
But now, in 2025, Microsoft was willing to give away one of its crown jewels—Forza—to Sony and PlayStation. It’s part of a trend of Xbox making more of its games multiplatform following its purchase of Activision. And rumors are swirling that even more Xbox games and franchises will make the leap to PlayStation and Switch. The Master Chief Collection is likely to arrive on other platforms sooner than later, according to insiders, as is a rumored (but unconfirmed) Gears of War trilogy collection. Insiders are also claiming that Fable and Starfield will be making the leap to PlayStation 5 and Switch 2.
Combine that shift in Xbox’s strategy with Game Pass being available on more devices and the company downplaying console sales for years and years now, and it becomes clear that Microsoft isn’t fighting in the console wars anymore. It arguably hasn’t been for a few years now, but the news of Forza jumping ship should be the confirmation that its flown the white flag and decided to become a massive publisher, harnessing the combined power of Game Pass, all of its studios, and Activision/Blizzard. It’s a strategy that is already paying off, too.
So if Xbox is done fighting, who is left? Well, not Nintendo.
Nintendo isn’t fighting in the war anymore
Yes, the company is releasing a Switch 2 and it’s going to sell incredibly well, assuming tariffs don’t inflate the price too much. But in 2025, Nintendo doesn’t care about the console war.
The Wii U was the last time the company behind Mario arguably tried to compete directly with Sony and Microsoft. It released the Wii U in late 2013, just within a year of the Xbox One and PS4, while trying to court third-party AAA franchises like Mass Effect, Call of Duty, and the Batman: Arkham games.
The Wii U ultimately was a failure for Nintendo and in 2017, it released the Switch, nearly three years before Sony and Xbox’s next consoles, the Xbox Series X/S and PS5, would arrive. Nintendo realized that it could do its own thing. It didn’t need to stick to the hardware cycle of the old console wars, competing directly with other companies every five to seven years. Instead, Nintendo focused on giving fans what they always wanted—a hybrid device merging its portable and home consoles into one—and found incredible success.
The Switch 2, launching later this year, continues to show that Nintendo doesn’t care about the console war. It’s not concerned about when the PS6 or next Xbox arrive. That doesn’t matter. All it has to do is make a new console that people want every several years and make sure it keeps turning out stellar first-party games for the machine. It can focus on itself and not worry about matching GPUs or terraflops with Sony or Xbox in some never-ending console war. And as long as it sells well, third-party publishers and devs will show up with games, even it means cutting them up and squishing them just to make stuff like Harry Potter or Batman work on the Switch’s hardware.
So if Nintendo is out and Xbox isn’t fighting anymore, then that just leaves Sony. And yeah, I think you can argue that Sony and PlayStation are still fighting the war. But if everyone else has left or given up, is it even a war anymore?
Sony is the last soldier fighting
Sony is still spending a lot of money to secure exclusive games like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Death Stranding 2. And, unlike Xbox, it’s not publishing its big, first-party games day one on PC or including them in its subscription service, PS Plus, at launch. It also spent millions of dollars developing a new mid-generation console—the PS5 Pro—which makes sense if your competitors are doing the same and you want to keep up with them. However, in 2025 the PS5 Pro feels like Sony firing a very pricey missile into an empty patch of ground. Maybe once upon a time there were tanks and jeeps in that spot. Not anymore, though. Everyone else has moved on.
In a technical sense, Sony has won the console wars because it’s A) Still here and B) the last one fighting. Though its an odd, hollow victory.
While Sony was fighting the old-school console war—holding on to exclusive games tightly and trying to win people over with bigger, more expensive consoles—Xbox went and became one of the biggest third-party game publishers in the world, making millions of dollars via games sold on PlayStation consoles. And Nintendo has been outselling everyone by simply doing its own thing and not engaging in the war. Meanwhile, free-to-play games on phones are making more than all of them on devices that have never been connected to the console wars.
2025 might not be the precise year the console war ended, as it likely ended years ago and what we see now are small skirmishes slowly wrapping up as news reaches each front, conflicts still puttering on though the struggle that once set it all in motion is largely resolved. I’m confident that even if more consoles are released in the future—which they will be—the era of three or more companies spending millions every month to fight each other in multiple ways as synchronized hardware cycles stretch across years is over.
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