LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 09: Phil Spencer, Executive President of Gaming at Microsoft, speaks ... [+] during the Xbox E3 2019 Briefing at The Microsoft Theater on June 09, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)Getty ImagesThe era of Xbox that has spanned almost 25 years appears to be over. In a pair of new interviews, Phil Spencer has once again reinforced what hes been saying for a while now about former Xbox exclusives going third party, though has also come up with a pitch for why you should still buy an Xbox. Hopefully. Maybe.When asked about any game being off the table for going third party, even a big-name project like Starfield, Spencer told Destin Legarie in a new interview, To keep games off of other platforms, we don't think that's the path.. that's not the path for us. It doesn't work for us."Then, in a separate but similar interview with Gamertag Radio:"We love our platform and our hardware but we're not going to put walls up where people can engage with the great games our studios are building(...)our games will show up in more places, no doubt.MORE FOR YOUThere is still a pitch to buy an Xbox, however, even as sales of the units continue to decline sharply the more Xboxs third party ambitions and everything is an Xbox marketing campaign spool up. Spencer:"I want people to pick hardware based on the capabilities of that hardware and the choices that they want to make about where they want to play. We want our hardware to win based on the capabilities that we have(...)hardware critical and fundamental to what Xbox is - not trying to gatekeep the games off different places."The pitch for why you should buy one console over another used to be a combination of this console performs better and has better features and you can play these specific games on it. Now, Xbox is chopping up that latter half into 1) some games launch on PlayStation (and/or the upcoming Switch 2) at release, 2) they arrive there on a time delay or 3) they hang in limbo indefinitely and are never ruled out as being ported over eventually.A core appeal of Xbox is now meant to be that you can get these exclusive releases on day one for free in some tiers of Xbox Game Pass, and you may have to wait an unknown amount of time on another platform. But in terms of the hardware simply being better, Im not sure theres enough of a difference between PS5 and Xbox Series X to make that case (the push for Series S is that its cheaper). And of course the advantage PlayStation now has is that its still making exclusives thatdo not and will never come to Xbox. Its expansion is into PC releases usually a year or more after release.Spencer is right in terms of the old path not working for Xbox. I mean, it wasnt, very clearly. Last generation had PS4 outselling Xbox One 2:1, an era where Spencer admits they probably lost the console war at that point as people assembled their game libraries. Now, recent reports are a similar 2:1 sales gap, or even 3:1 or even now, closer to 5:1 monthly the more Xboxes are de-emphasized.StarfieldBethesdaWhere Xbox is starting to turn things around, however, is in its software. It owns the eternally popular Call of Duty and Minecraft, which will print money until the end of time. It has found success in the live genre with games like Sea of Thieves. It still boasts icons like Marcus Fenix and Master Chief (even if Chief is in hibernation for a while). New releases like Indiana Jones have been received well. Games like Avowed, DOOM, Fable and Perfect Dark look promising. Forza and Microsoft Flight Simulator are essentially guaranteed quality and dominate those genres.So, what do you do when you finally have a slate of good first party games but you still cannot sell more consoles, and you subscription service is capping out? Well, I guess you do this.Can Microsoft come back in the hardware game? Perhaps, at least to some extent. A rumored Xbox handheld that beats a Sony one to market could do very well, provided it doesnt immediately ship all its games to Switch 2. Xbox has also promised a next-gen console despite all this, and who knows, maybe it figures out some trick to dominate Sony in terms of power. Just waiting for them to say its powered by AI or something.Yes, its a very weird time for Xbox and very understandable how die-hard fans of the brand are disappointed with the direction it has taken. But Xbox is sort of running out of options of how to make all this work, and going third party, it believes, is its current best bet.Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.