Nonsense, when Xbox showed up Nintendo was already an established brand, and they stole their thunder, starting from scratch.
Xbox has brand recognition with IPs like Halo as well, but they don't use them as wisely. That's on Xbox, not because anyone else has some kind of "advantage".
I know people are going around using this argument because benji sales mentioned it, but he glossed over things and simplified it and it's not a good example IMO.
I agree that BOTW, Mario Kart 8, and Mario Odyssey were a triple-combo from hell that did wonders for Nintendo in 2017, but to be able to deliver that, you need a few things in place that Xbox didn't have.
- The market at large thought the Wii-U was an upgraded Wii. It was the worst branded big-three console ever and is hard to compare anything to.
- Even so, the Nintendo games themselves sold fine, even on the tiny install base, this shows how incredibly strong those franchises are. They just needed a different console to thrive on.
- Halo and Gears, the big Xbox franchises, got absolutely decimated during the Xbox One lifecycle, they were not console sellers anymore.
- Xbox's studios from the 360 era degraded during the Xbox One era and lost a lot of talent and momentum.
Xbox did not have big games to push Xbox Series S/X. And I know that you would answer with: "They need to have a higher standard, it's on them if they can't make better games" or something like that. But the truth is, the Xbox studios are not on the level of Sony Santa Monica or internal Nintendo studios. Those studios took years and years to become who they were, you just don't put together studios that can make 95+ games out of nothing. It's a long process and Xbox had nothing like that, the prime-era early 2000s Bungie was the closest to that they ever had.
Imagine this, a huge triple-A game usually takes 4-5 years, so to have any sort of gigantic transformative Halo or Gears game ready for the Series consoles, Phil and Xbox would have had to build top-tier studios in 2014 or 2015. That is when Phil Spencer took over. And even then, that they would be able to build top-tier studios on that scale and that their first game would be a 95+ game, is not realistic.
Even if he somehow managed to put together a top-tier studio in 2015, they would likely just be done with their first game around these times, to be honest. The point is, Xbox lost their capability to build the sort of Halo games they needed when Bungie left, and Gears had ran its course. So his point that Xbox would struggle to out-console Playstation and Nintendo in 2020 with the Series X/S is likely the right take, but it's a stupid thing to say in public.