What do Xbox need to do

Before I start anything I want to make very clear that I am not an Xbox fanboy. I play on PC. That does mean that my experience is generally more Xbox focussed than PlayStation, but I don’t play on console and have no horse in the race. I do find the console history and where we are today interesting and have spent many hours, like most PC gamers, trying to understand the dogged fanboyism people have for these consoles. Most PC gamers like Steam, but that is because Steam and Valve meet us where we are, offer the best experience and have the best ecosystem that caters to many different gamers. The consoles have got by for many years simply on exclusives. The metric as to whether a console is successful has always been how many they sold and more specifically how many more than their competitors they sold. This is not a PC ecosystem issue. Valve has made moves onto the hardware ecosystem again but not with any mindset to dislodge the Big Boys in the console space. I do not think console sales are Microsoft’s main drive anymore. They want to sell consoles, sure,  but their main drive is making money. Sony are the same irrelevant of what people seem to think, but are still hanging on to console sales as being a driver for making money for external sources as it is a metric they can point to easily and makes them appealing to investors. Money is the main driver in the gaming space period. I think this is where Microsoft, and to an extent Valve, have upset the apple cart because they have shifted direction and by proxy the focus of their agenda. 

This is where Xbox’s strategy is genius if they follow it through with it. They are trying to entice people into their ecosystem, not with exclusives, but rather with accessibility. This is not to say that it will work mind you, as I feel there is a lot of reliance on outside factors they cannot control. There is also the fact that they have had to change CEO and President right as the middle part of their plan comes to fruition with the new Xbox Helix, the uptake of the Xbox ROG Ally X and the work being done on the new Xbox experience\paired down version of Windows. They are also hampered by indecision and backtracking on naming conventions (they really should have just gone for the Xbox 2) as well as their incredibly atrocious ability to market their product and more importantly to get across what they are doing. Xbox’s plight has come from a mixture of things and I feel that they have been hindered by themselves as much as the competition. 

The best place to start with this discussion is to note that everyone who speaks about Xbox always speaks the truth irrelevant of their viewpoint. There are just so many factors that have led Xbox to the position they are today that it can be hard to pull it all together in order to look at what happened, what could have been done differently in order to have a better outcome and of course where they go from here. They were second in the console space, Nintendo doesn’t count as I feel they are in a Mario world of their own. They, quite frankly, were never going to catch up to Playstation. This is for a multitude of reasons but the obvious ones are the fact that people have their digital library there, like the Xbox leadership team have said on a regular basis, they lost the worst console generation to lose. Playstation owners have their friends lists and years of interactions and memories playing in their ecosystem and for Xbox to overcome this would be a huge ask. So instead they decided to stop playing Playstation's game where Sony holds all the cards, and instead decided to go the Valve route and create an ecosystem that is designed to entice people in. They created the Play Anywhere program so that if you buy a game on the Xbox store you can play it in a multitude of places. But once again due to many factors this message has not really got out. The whole idea of buying a game once and being able to play it on your console, PC, Phone, Laptop and even your TV should really be a selling point for the Xbox\Microsoft ecosystem, but instead there is a drive to ridicule something that in its very essence is consumer friendly. The ‘Everything is an Xbox’ campaign was derided as being the end of Xbox where it should have been a driver to this being the norm. Just because you can play a game on your phone does not mean you have to. The ability to end a game that you are enjoying because you need to go somewhere and being able to pick it up on your phone or tablet while on the train or in the car, should be a big selling point. How many people in the PlayStation ecosystem have double if not triple dipped on a game? At $70/£70 a game that's a lot of money. What baffles me is people defend this practice and even belittle people that don’t. There are cries of ‘support the devs’ and yet these companies continue to close developers irrelevant of how many copies you buy. 

Then there was the launch of the Xbox One (actually a good name as a reset for the Xbox) with the Kinect. The whole this is an entertainment system was a clever idea and in all realism that is exactly what the Playstation was as well, but the difference is PlayStation went ‘This is a console that plays DVDs’ to Xbox’s ‘This is an entertainment system with a weird camera device attached that is always watching you’ and forgetting to add ‘This is also first and foremost a fully fledged Xbox’ was an oversight. The always online was another sticking point and not necessary. As I have said, Xbox have admitted that this was a major misstep that has been one of the biggest factors that has led to their current predicament. 

It is a shame that Xbox didn’t release their own handheld and I really hope that they do in the future, but the release of the Xbox ROG Ally is a turning point in Xbox’s strategy. The ability to have a powerful handheld to take with you on the go that plays your Xbox games is a key part of the Everything is an Xbox plan. This device is a good addition to the Xbox family and the power compared to the other handhelds on the market make it a worthy addition. The elephant in the room is of course the price. There is unfortunately nothing that can be done about that. In order to have a handheld that is powerful enough to play the games people want to play and is at least a little bit futureproof is a tall ask. Unfortunately this was a major sticking point and people seemed to be happy to compare it to the PlayStation Portal which is ridiculous. To compare a device that is designed specifically for streaming your games direct from your console to the Xbox Ally that plays games natively and expect the latter to be the same price is a fantasy. Consoles are £500 and the PlayStation Pro is £700 so to expect a handheld that has to ensure that the components are small enough and efficient enough to be less than that should not even be a conversation. I want to stress that it isn’t that I think the PlayStation Portal is a bad device but they are distinctly different devices. 

Onto what xbox needs to do in order for this to work. There is a history of Xbox having these grand ideas and then half arsing the execution. This is why I don’t think the strategy will work but I would love to be proved wrong. I also believe they had no choice but to do something like this. In order to ensure this direction works they need to ensure that they execute everything they are planning perfectly. There is already distrust in the Xbox brand as well as an enormous differential between the PlayStation numbers and their own. They need to create an ecosystem that will entice PlayStation and others to join in. They have so many consumer benefiting practices, their support for indie developers is a major plus and Game Pass (love it or hate it) is still the best deal in gaming if you play a lot of games and want to make use of the Play Anywhere games as it comes with XCloud. 

First and foremost they need to make sure their marketing and any information they release is clear and concise and make sure that if there is any misrepresentation or misinformation they squash it with facts and clarification. They cannot continue with this trajectory of letting the narrative around their devices and services run away from them or keep quiet when people misrepresent or misunderstand their marketing. I have seen so many times where Xbox releases some information (like Everything is an Xbox) where people including the media purposely misrepresent the information and Xbox does not clarify or push back. Most importantly they need to ensure the media don’t misunderstand (purposefully or otherwise) the information they are trying to get to the consumer and ensure they are corrected as needed. 

Xbox needs to emphasise that they are still a console manufacturer and that gamers come first. The new Xbox needs to be a PC with a console first experience and people need to understand that. They need to be able to play all their Xbox games on the device. They need to create an emulator that is standard across the console and PC so you can play your old Xbox library (all of it) on all devices you connect to with your Xbox account. Their backward compatibility is one of their major selling points but they don’t ensure that people see that they actively do it where others do not. It would benefit them and developers if they only needed to develop for PCs and then the Xbox console can run it. The new Xbox Experience app needs to be the same experience you expect on the console now and ensure that it is designed from the ground up to be as resource light as possible and run exactly the same on the PC so there is continuity between all devices (including on mobile and other devices). They need to create an ecosystem where the device is not important. This is where they will differentiate themselves from the other companies. 

They need to release the Xbox paired down version of Windows on the PC. You need to be able to boot into this version to play games and therefore ensure you gain the benefit of freed up resources by removing all the bloat that Windows is renowned for. Steam has this feature with Big Picture but, aside from their own devices (that are Linux based OSs that come with their own problems including compatibility), they cannot do this on a OS or system level. Xbox should be seeing Steam and Valve as their main competitor as a service provider and therefore ensure their service offers all the same benefits that users receive from Steam and then work to go over and above. If they carry this over to the console as well they will be setting a standard for others to follow. Nintendo is obviously exempt from this as it seems they can do as they please and get away with it. 

But most importantly they need to do it right the first time. There have been too many times where they have a good idea (Windows is a good example as well as the Xbox Experience on the ROG Ally) but don’t follow through. Valve used to be like this as well but since the release of the Steam Deck they have been on the ball and have repeatedly run updates and improvements on their devices including Steam OS ensuring that this is one of the OSs increasing in popularity with gamers, especially over Windows. Microsoft has been making software including OSs for 40 odd years and in this case a lot of the hard work has been done by others in so much as they can see what has worked and use that as a baseline.

Microsoft and Xbox have a massive amount of work to do and an insurmountable hill to climb in order to capture people’s imagination. People are naturally resistant to anything they do. I have heard people say all they need to do is release good games and people will come back, but this hasn’t happened over the last little while where they have released many good and interesting games. 

I feel there is just too much for them to do in order to bring back good will. There are too many pitfalls and areas where they need to get it all just right. I think they need someone at the helm who will challenge people who misrepresent what they are trying to do. I also think that Xbox has blinked already with Asha Sharma and Microsoft need to ensure their investment in AI pays off at least within Microsoft itself. I do believe Satya Nadella when he says that Xbox is an important piece of Microsoft’s portfolio and that it is extremely profitable. I doubt Microsoft will shutter the gaming department as it is a steady earner. 

My hope is that Microsoft and Xbox will do well and this will force the others to rethink their practices and what gamers want. The hope is that gamers see the benefit of a company in the gaming space working towards them. I have little to do with PlayStation, not because I don’t like them, but because as a PC gamer they do little to bring me into their ecosystem. They release their games years later at full price and then let them sit there. They are not a ‘meet the customer where they are’ kind of company, because they never needed to be, people just turn up for them. The more companies that do well from customer focussed practices we have the better.