The gaming community is home to some wonderful people. It’s also home to some truly awful creatures. The key to making the gaming community the best community on the planet is to weed out the delinquents and reprobates. While Nintendo and Playstation have great communities and I’m proud to be part of them, they’re kind of on their own. Xbox is the only one that actively works at making sure the community is the best it can be.
Xbox has an incredibly active social media presence with different public faces that all help spread messages of inclusiveness and friendliness in the gaming space. But having so many accounts and people from the brand being active on social media also makes them more approachable. It’s not just the official Xbox account or GamePass account tweeting memes. You can interact with Phil Spencer or Aaron Greenberg or Larry Hryb. You’re not just an Xbox fan, interacting with other Xbox fans, you’re interacting with people for Xbox.
Playstation & Nintendo don’t really have that. Nintendo used to have Reggie but his replacement, Doug Bowser isn’t the same. He’s on Twitter but his tweets are sporadic and mostly promotional. Playstation’s Jim Ryan doesn’t have social media. You’ll only hear from him during press events and promotional blog posts and then he goes back into hiding to do CEO things. Which is fine, he needs to make sure Playstation continues to do what it does best but there isn’t really a public face for the company the way Xbox and Nintendo have. Being apart of the Playstation community is almost like being in a medieval village where we’re all peasants in the village while Playstation itself is locked in the castle and they only come out onto the balcony to make and announcement and soak up the cheers.
Xbox also does things to bring it’s fans even closer to the brand. They have the Ambassador program where anyone can sign up to become an Xbox Ambassador and get rewarded for being a positive member of the community, making sure everyone feels safe and welcome. There’s special places like a forum and discord for Xbox Ambassadors to talk to and get to know one another. It’s a community within a community.
Playstation and Nintendo have great communities but they’re left to figure it out themselves. There is no active Playstation or Nintendo program or initiative for their communities to come closer to together. Why isn’t there a Playstation Ambassador program? I’m sure I’m not the only one that would love to be able to join a program like that for Playstation. To be a beacon of positivity in the Playstation community and meet like minded fans.
Nintendo meanwhile sometimes appears actively hostile towards it’s fans. They have a Brand Ambassador program for content creators but many of the biggest ones like Arlo and Beatemups have been pulled from the program without a real explanation. Nintendo fans are routinely punished for fan games or non-official communities or events. I could write an entire essay on the Smash Melee debacle of 2020.
If you’re a member of the Xbox community, you can take part in things like FanFest, you can be an Xbox Insider to test out test builds of certain system update, games and programs and talk with other Insiders. Why isn’t there a Nintendo or Playstation FanFest style event where we can all celebrate our love of those brands. Sure we can do it ourselves but it wouldn’t be the same as Sony or Nintendo making official events to celebrate their fans and their fans to celebrate their fandom.
I love Playstation, I love Nintendo and I love Xbox. But with Playstation and Nintendo, it feels like being part of their “community” is just another word for being a fan. With Xbox, it feels like an actual community, where the actual leaders actively interact with it’s members, they are official programs and events to meet other members and celebrate the brand and it’s fans. Phil Spencer himself is known to let random people play online with him from time to time in games like Destiny. At the end of the days these are all just corporate brands that want you as customers but Xbox is the one that tries it’s hardest to at least bring it’s fans closer together.
Rongo 