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 f