Xbox has published a big memo outlining its long-term goals for the brand.
In a blog post, Xbox boss Asha Sharma and Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty elaborated on the company’s renewed mission statement going forward. First off, they acknowledged that the Microsoft Gaming branding “describes our structure, but it does not describe our ambition,” so the company is “going back to where we started and changing our team’s name” to Xbox.
More importantly, Sharma and Booty acknowledged some shortcomings with the brand, like infrequent new feature drops on consoles, a presence on PC that isn’t “strong enough,” some consumers getting priced out and “fragmented” core experiences like search, discovery, social, and personalization.
To address those issues and usher in “the next era” of Xbox, the pair detailed four priorities going forward: hardware, content, experience, and services.
For hardware, some of the goals include “stabilizing” the current-gen Xbox Series X/S consoles as “healthy and high-quality,” making the upcoming console, codenamed Project Helix, “lead in performance” while playing both console and PC games and producing “comfortable, personal, high-performance accessories.”
For content, targets beyond simply continuing to support popular franchises include growing live service games, evolving third-party partnerships, expanding into mobile-first audiences, and elevating “creator-centric” platforms like Minecraft, The Elder Scrolls and Sea of Thieves.
For experience, the pair says they want to “fix the fundamentals” for both players and partners and “overhaul” discovery, customization, social and personalization to better connect the community.
And finally, some of the services work will focus on bolstering Game Pass with “clear differentiation and sustainable economics,” improve cloud gaming functionality and use mergers and acquisitions “deliberately to accelerate growth where organic paths are too slow.”
These are some notable goals, so it will be interesting to see how the company plans to execute on them. So far, one big change actually came this week in the form of a price reduction for Xbox Game Pass, with Sharma publicly admitting that the service “has become too expensive for too many players.” In the long-term, Sharma has said the service needs to become more “flexible” for consumers, and a recent leak suggests that will include a “Starter Edition” option in partnership with Discord.
Beyond all of that, Sharma and Booty also mentioned that they will “reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI, and share more as we learn and decide.” It’s unclear exactly what they mean by that, but given the “learn and decide” comment, it would seem that they’re still figuring it out as well.
In any case, it seems like a clear acknowledgement that consumers don’t really know what to expect when it comes to “Xbox games.” For one, Microsoft’s “This is an Xbox” campaign, which was meant to promote its push for multiplatform, streaming-supported releases, only confused people, and it led to the company quietly retiring it last month.
And beyond that, most first-party Xbox games have been coming to PlayStation and/or Nintendo platforms, including flagship titles like Gears of War and Halo. At the same time, next month’s Forza Horizon 6 is debuting on Xbox and PC first before releasing on PS5 at a later date, a strategy that Microsoft employed with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle between 2024 and 2025. With no apparent consistency here, it makes sense that the company is promising to look more into exclusivity and windowing.
The AI comment is also noteworthy. When Sharma was announced as the successor to longtime Xbox boss Phil Spencer, some were concerned about her previous role as a Microsoft AI exec. In response, she’s claimed that she has “no tolerance for bad AI” in gaming and has even used the term “soulless AI slop.” (Even after her boss, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, got upset about people using that term.) But of course, Microsoft as a whole is, like most Big Tech companies, absolutely obsessed with AI, pouring billions upon billions into the tech. It’s unclear, then, how AI will factor into Xbox going forward.
In the short-term, at least, we’ll learn a bit more about some of Xbox’s plans soon. On June 7, the company will hold its annual Xbox Games Showcase, immediately followed by a presentation focused entirely on Gears of War: E-Day from Vancouver’s The Coalition.
Image credit: Xbox
Source: Xbox
