A certain term has been flying around Twitter for a few weeks now, started mainly after The Game Awards failed to nominate games like Starfield for many awards, and Xbox was generally missing in most categories outside of Hi-Fi Rush securing a number of nominations. That term is the “Xbox tax.”
The Xbox tax is the idea that a game will be judged more harshly because of the fact that it is an Xbox game, made by Microsoft or one of its recently purchased publishers. That anti-Xbox bias, mainly among game journalists, has led to point deduction on Xbox games that otherwise would have scored higher.
I’ve recently been asked about this a number of times, including on a recent podcast, and my answer is the same. The Xbox tax is not real. It’s not a thing. And if you think it’s a thing, it’s because you have seen one really stupid quote suggesting it’s real, or have cited a handful of Xbox jokes made by games journalists over the years.
The really stupid quote in question, part of the reason this entire thing exists, is from Metro, which is owned by The Daily Mail, a UK tabloid in the business of deliberately upsetting people for views. The quote is from their 4/5 review of Hi-Fi Rush, and says:
“The wasteland that has been the Xbox release schedules for the last few years limits the accolades we can give the game but it’s a breath of fresh air for Xbox gamers, developer Tango Gameworks, and the rhythm action genre as a whole.”
This is, from what I can see, the only time an outlet, any outlet, has specifically indicated that they docked the score of an Xbox game because of Xbox not having good games in previous years. It’s deeply idiotic and makes absolutely no sense when scoring a game. It is also a single review from a single publication that is a subsidiary of a known inflammatory tabloid written by someone who isn’t even named in the byline. The article is published by “GameCentral News Writer.”
The rest of it is…nothing. A joke from IGN about God of War not being on Xbox. An IGN news editor saying they didn’t like Microsoft’s big acquisition spree. Another IGN writer (they really love IGN) joking about PlayStation having yearly tentpoles and Microsoft not having any.
Yes, of course you can find hundreds and hundreds of negative headlines about Xbox. You can also find that many about PlayStation or Nintendo. I have written articles criticizing essentially every console-maker or publisher that exists at one point or another, and things go through phases. I was quite negative about Xbox in the Xbox One era. I was much more positive about the Xbox Series X at launch. This year, I’ve been called a Sony fanboy for saying Redfall is one of the worst AAA releases I’ve ever played. And then I’m an Xbox shill for giving Starfield a 9.5/10. It’s all cherrypicking, and people only remember the last thing you wrote, or the headlines they screenshotted four years ago.
But the core claim here, that game journalists actually lower the scores of Xbox games based on anti-Xbox bias is not true outside of this one quote from one writer who doesn’t even have a name. To extrapolate that out to hundreds of websites and thousands of writers is absolute nonsense. Not that this doesn’t happen all the time in like, life, one bad apple damning the entire tree, it’s still exhausting to see here.
If there is one argument I can get behind at least tangentially related to this, it’s something regarding an Xbox coverage or playtime gap, to a certain extent. At baseline, if the Nintendo Switch has sold a zillion units and PS5 has sold 2:1 consoles compared to Xbox Series X/S, there will simply be…more people playing Sony games. More people playing those games equals more coverage, and it could even end up meaning something like fewer nominations. While I don’t think this is why say, Starfield didn’t get a GOTY nomination in a totally stacked year, I could buy it being a reason that maybe Halo Infinite or Sea of Thieves didn’t land a nomination for Best Ongoing Game, as not enough people in the voting pool played them, perhaps. But this is related to the amount of time people have to balance coverage and Xbox’s install base shortage. This is not “journalists hate Microsoft so they score Xbox games low.”
The Xbox tax is nothing. It is, as the kids say, “cope.” There have been many, many high-scoring Xbox games, the past few years especially, leading to Xbox being Metacritic’s publisher of the year in 2021. And who is giving those scores? The same game journalists now accused of docking points through bias. There are many Sony versus Xbox issues that can be debated, this is not one of them.
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