"“When I sat down with Asha for the first time, she asked me…”Is it fixable?”
“She was not talking about the business, that’s part of it. She was talking about this specific business, which I’m now helping to run, which is fixable. I’m a strategic optimist. I think it’s incredibly defeatist to think that in any scenario you can’t do better…I joined because I believe I can contribute to that”
“I joined because what she told me she wanted to achieve, I believed was right and achievable… we can turn this company around and grow if we do better by our players – and we need to do that, we languished for several years – then the rest of the industry can in aggregate too.”
“At the macro scale we see a healthier than ever industry, you can find challenges at the national scale, but we see that players will come back when there’s a great slate…we are capable of turning around, and we have started – all of that is reason for optimism.”
Posted by ThinWhiteDuke00
16 Comments
Think it takes guts to sit there and ask a (at the time) non employee if your brand is fixable. Means you recognize where its at
Say what you want, but I’m glad we have leaders that actually want Xbox to succeed rather than just turn into a glorified third-party publisher.
People will call it “tribalism” and “console war fanboyism”, but competition is great for the industry, for innovation, and for keeping the other competitors on their toes about price, games, and hardware.
They need to level up their game quality then. Under Phil Spencer, most of the games were 6 or 7/10. We need to return to the days of the 360 when Xbox was releasing games that the whole industry paid attention to.
Well he’s certainly an optimist, now let’s see how long it lasts. Phil used to have a spring in his step early on too but by the end looked like he wanted to end it all.
Source? 🤔
“Is it fixable” is a pretty wild question for a CEO.
As an another commenter had pointed out, we need great games in order for this work. The PS4 had an unprecedented generational run from 2016 to 2020 with exclusives.
Gears E-Day minimum needs to be a 9/10. Less pressure on Clockwork but it needs to be mid to high 80s.
….michael ball? Matthew lol
I’m glad he joined Xbox
These execs sure can string a lot of words together without actually saying anything.
“We are working very hard to rethink everything that we can about Helix”
“We are working hard to rethink what the console model can look like”
“We are working very hard to figure out the best way to navigate it for a way that works for everyone”
Get back to me when you’ve actually come up with something
Are these interviews available in video form anywhere?
There’s only 1 way to succeed. Exclusives alone isn’t enough. Xbox needs quality exclusives. And by quality I don’t mean mid low 80 games that come and go and barely sell. The 360 era had games even ps, nintendo gamers had to buy an Xbox for. Many 90+ meta games that were in the zeitgeist everyone knew and loved them. Phil was a complete failure in this regard. And this is why console sales didn’t grow, this is why they went multiplat and this is also why that strategy is failing because almost all their games isn’t selling there either cause the games just aren’t good enough. Most of these Xbox studios were given too much creative freedom and they failed to deliver. Playground delivers so they deserve that creative freedom. Others do not.They need a more hands on approach like Playstation or Nintendo.
Phil Spencer might be semi controversial now but he was right when he said that losing the Xbox One generation was the worst one to lose as it was when everyone was building up their digital library of games. Making people increasingly unlikely to switch platforms.
And Microsoft always set unrealistic Targets for Xbox like the 30 percent profit margins or 100 million gamepass subscribers by 2030.
While Asha is seemingly being given more leeway to operate Xbox as she sees fit right now. Microsoft also let Phil Spencer spend 80 billion on acquisitions which is arguably also a fair bit of leeway.
So it could be only a matter of time before Microsoft once again start imposing impossible to meet goals and we end up back where we started.
I want Xbox to succeed as a rising tide lifts all boats and Xbox succeeding is only good for the games industry as a whole. But Microsoft’s past behavior doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
This guy has been a great hire the thing that really stuck out for me is he wants to be transparent with the players first, that’s why Aaron Greenberg corrected Tom Warren about the last minute decision on gears cause it was a month ago; they didn’t want leaks so only a few knew the reason is they wanted to let the players know first 👍
Looks like a bit naive, as if he was a business consultant that was never running decisions inside a company before.
But let’s hope for the best.
ABK put ms on the back foot and shouldn’t have really gone through with the purchase. They need an instant return on investment and that was a huge issue. Now it seems they want the Xbox brand to succeed.