It's time for Xbox to stop apologizing for its existence

Xbox is changing under new CEO Asha Sharma, but it's still very early days yet.

Microsoft's Asha Sharma took over from Phil Spencer a few weeks ago, and we've already seen a flurry of changes to the Xbox banner, and there are more to come based on what I'm hearing. But that's a story for another day.

In the short term, we've seen a flurry of rapid-fire feature updates to the Xbox Series X|S, after months of virtual radio silence. We've seen Asha Sharma respond to fans' concerns publicly about the lack of Xbox exclusive games, as well as the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Sharma said she wants Xbox to return to its "renegade spirit," and put its community at the core of what it does.

It reflects a wider change at Microsoft as of late. Both Xbox and Windows are enjoying a renewed focus on user feedback, and both have reduced margin pressures from the top down. This has allowed Windows and Xbox both to invest in quality, with arbitrary austerity measures lifted. We heard last year that Microsoft's bean counters were trying to encourage Xbox to seek a 30% profit margin — which is a thoroughly insane idea and unprecedented in gaming platform history.

In any case, those times are now over, as they evidently didn't work. Xbox hardware is in free-fall decline. Player growth is stagnant, and revenue growth is down, too. It's thanks in large part to an underperforming Call of Duty ... but also CFO Amy Hood's absurd austerity measures.

Xbox is facing many issues from various directions, but if there's one thing that I think should define Xbox's new era and "renegade spirit," it's this: Xbox should stop hiding in the shadows, and it should certainly stop apologizing for its existence.

Nice guys finish last, evidently

I was watching the Red Bull Age of Empires Wololo event recently, which, in a way, showcased a big Microsoft success story.

Age of Empires is one of Microsoft's longest-lived and most legendary home-grown franchises, sitting up there with the likes of Halo, Flight Simulator, Forza, and even Microsoft Solitaire itself. It has been a staple for decades, and under Xbox's Phil Spencer, the RTS is enjoying a renaissance of biblical proportions.

The Age of Empires Red Bull esports event was a huge success. It had a live orchestra, period costumes, hundreds of thousands of viewers, and hundreds in attendance... but I couldn't help but notice, Microsoft was basically nowhere to be seen.

There was no Xbox branding at the event whatsoever. No presence or mention, and as far as I could tell, no involvement from Microsoft here.

It was a Red Bull event at the end of the day, sure, and Age of Empires' continued run is in large part down to its passionate community. But, I would argue it's an undeniable success story for the Xbox regime under Phil Spencer, too, and previous studio head Shannon Loftis, another Microsoft veteran. Microsoft didn't have to revive Age of Empires and resume work on it, patching, balancing, and adding new expansions and content. RTS as a genre is certainly not as "hot" as extraction shooters or battle royales or whatever other service games exist — but World's Edge and Xbox cooked here, don't they deserve to celebrate in that success at all?

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It was a small example in a wider "issue" that many Xbox community members have identified in recent years, and it can be found in things like the "This is an Xbox" campaign. "This is an Xbox," inexplicably downplayed Microsoft's own Xbox console hardware and advertised competitor products instead. The Samsung Galaxy Fold phone was described "as an Xbox," for example, in a huge campaign ad I saw on billboards in major train stations. In all that is sensical: WHY is Microsoft paying to advertise not only a competing hardware product, but a competing operating system from Google, and a wholesale competing computing paradigm?

Apparently, Asha Sharma agreed, and pretty definitively killed the "This is an Xbox" ad campaign a little while ago.

This trend of "advertising competing products" continued recently with the latest round of Xbox showcase events, where Microsoft advertised competing platforms in addition to Xbox. Microsoft paid for and put together a showcase for Metro 2039 recently, and at the end, was keen to inform viewers that the game is available not only on Xbox Series X|S, but also PlayStation 5, Steam, Epic Games, and also the Samsung Smart Fridge (probably).

Conversely, the Metro 2039 trailer on the PlayStation YouTube trailer makes no mention whatsoever of Xbox, as you might expect. And who in their right mind would blame them? They're literally in competition.

Xbox's behavior here is certainly "nice," and in a perfect world, it's great to inform the viewer of where they can access the content. But it's also not really a "nice" world we live in. Xbox operates in a competitive world where competing platforms actively want to kill Xbox and leave its customers with decades of orphaned content, locked to a dead store.

Microsoft has been keen to impress the immediacy of challenges it is facing in gaming in various interviews. Whether it's blaming the unprecedented generational shift away from traditional gaming experiences towards memeable content on platforms like Roblox, addictive infinite scrolling platforms like TikTok, or other macro-economic challenges. Microsoft should perhaps first look inward at how it's showing up in this incredibly competitive landscape before placing the blame externally.

Xbox has been behaving like a company that is on the outs. It has behaved like a company that isn't interested in competition. Instead of accepting blame for downward trends in its business, it has shrugged them off as "it is what it is" and declined the fight. If you won't fight for your customers, why should customers invest in your product?

Renegades compete

The problems facing Xbox are numerous and complex, but also by no means exclusive to it. Roblox, TikTok, etc, have stagnated players across all platforms to some degree, but instead of giving up, the play should be to figure out what makes those experiences preferable and offer something better.

"This is an Xbox" really underpinned a visible "let's give up" mentality to me. It didn't advertise any product or service from what I could tell. It didn't explain why your Samsung smart toaster is an Xbox. That marketing spend could've gone into advertising Xbox features that are actually good, like Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Quick Resume, man. Hell, a campaign around the fact that the Xbox Series S will be the most affordable way to play Grand Theft Auto 6 this year would've been a better spend than whatever that was.

In a landscape that is more diluted and competitive for our attention than ever, Xbox can't go around intentionally projecting an image of abject weakness. Where's the Xbox Series X|S stock and retail presence? Where's the actual Xbox product marketing? Where's regional and global product marketing? Xbox branding should show up on every game they own and every trailer they put out. Xbox account integrations, achievements, and social features should be in every game they own, from Candy Crush on Android to Call of Duty on PlayStation. Xbox should be weaponizing its massive IP investment to compete rather than shrinking away from the "crime" of acknowledging they even own it. Stop apologetically advertising competing platforms, many of whom actively want to see you exit the industry entirely, on marketing you literally paid for. Xbox actively promoting Google's Android, Google, Microsoft's corporate arch nemesis, is just crazy to me.

You bought all of this stuff ... Use it!

It's early days, of course, and hey, maybe none of this is enough to stymie the bleed off to Roblox, Steam, and other greener pastures. I've simplified a lot of the issues here for brevity, too. But Xbox was the OG greener pasture for a long time ... it's high time to fight the downward trends, instead of simply lying down and accepting them.

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