Xbox President Sarah Bond discusses the future — "Hardware is absolutely core to everything we do at Xbox. Our most valuable players love the hardware experience."

Microsoft's Xbox brand is stressed.

Whether it's layoffs, price hikes, freefall hardware declines, or a retreat from community engagement — Xbox hasn't exactly been in a good place lately. The breakneck pace of Xbox strategy changes post-pandemic have led to confusion and doubt about the platform's future, at most among its core audience.

Microsoft has been speaking up about Xbox's future, but increasingly via mainstream media channels, eschewing its old strategy of engaging with the community directly. It paints a picture of Xbox becoming more business and shareholder-oriented rather than community and consumer-oriented, as it seeks to appease CFO Amy Hood's industry-defying profit margin demands.

As part of that effort, Xbox President Sarah Bond recently spoke to Fortune about her career, and offered some hints about the current trajectory of Xbox.

When asked about what Xbox is really about in 2025, Sarah Bond spoke primarily about access, but wasn't reluctant to talk about hardware being "core" to the experience as well.

"Xbox is really all about making it easy for people to access and play their games. We know that's what players care about. And so all of this innovation, all of the things that are happening in the industry, they are being harnessed to enable that more easily and more accessibly for customers than ever before.

All of these things are potential disruptions if you look at it another way and say, hey, I want to actually keep with the status quo. But they're actually things that the player really wants. They're true unlocks."

Sarah admitted that changing the status quo at Xbox has been "hard," as the firm shifts away from a hardware focus to multi-platform gaming.

"Xbox is a brand that people have counted on now for almost 25 years. We're coming up to the 25-year anniversary, and people who play Xbox love Xbox. Our players deeply care about what Xbox is. It has a ton of meaning for them, and so changing it is hard.

You know there are things coming in the future that you need to invest in to help ensure the long-term health and growth of the brand. But you also know there are players who really love what Xbox is right now.

We relentlessly look at the core metrics of the health of the business: how many people are playing, what our hours of play are, what people are buying, and what people are subscribing to. Listening to both what people say and how they behave is how we continuously make changes, adjust, and learn along the way."

Perhaps the biggest question mark over Xbox's future revolves around, specifically whether or not the firm actually will continue to care about hardware. Every quarter since the pandemic, Xbox has reported relentless hardware sales declines, as stock availability sinks and marketing presence dries up. Prices have also gone up, and with Microsoft putting its games onto other platforms, so conventional wisdom would ask, why bother with first-party hardware?

Sarah Bond says hardware is core to Xbox, and that their most valuable players remain within the Xbox ecosystem.

"Hardware is absolutely core to everything that we do at Xbox, because we know that our most valuable players—the people who love Xbox—love the hardware experience. That is why we are working on our next generation hardware. It's going to be a powerful experience, and one that also enables people to take their library with them.

What’s really important here is that while people want to play their library on the console, they also want to be able to play it on PC or stream it through the cloud. The Xbox experience starts with the console, but then gives people something they can experience across all screens if they choose to, bringing their library, their community, their identity, and the store with them everywhere they go."

We reported a while ago now that the next Xbox will essentially be a PC, complete with a compatibility layer for your existing console library of games. If Microsoft can execute this while also remaining affordable with console-like usability, it could be amazing. That's a BIG if.

Xbox's strategy is sound on paper, but will it resonate beyond the board room?

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The full interview has a ton more context about where Sarah sees the Xbox brand heading over the next few years, as it switches up its hardware and software strategy in big, often jarring ways.

With Xbox no longer having any form of unique selling point, Microsoft is hoping that its "Play Anywhere" approach can become its "exclusive," in a world where Halo itself has headed across to PlayStation. Xbox fans now no longer have anything strong or tangible to point to as a unique value proposition, and it's doubly true if they aren't interested in things like Xbox Cloud Gaming or Xbox Play Anywhere.

Microsoft is betting that Xbox Cloud Gaming and Xbox PC can open up the platform to new gamers, growing the community horizontally rather than vertically. The problem, of course, is that Microsoft's growth there remains shrouded in mystery, as it declines to share granular figures on its overall Xbox business health. All Microsoft offers really is "hardware sales declines," which doesn't paint a pretty picture.

Xbox PC has huge usability gaps and missing social features that need to be addressed, and Xbox Cloud Gaming is heavily situational in many cases. Sarah Bond says that the firm listens to feedback from fans, but it's not always apparent to be the case — I'm not sure any fan asked for Xbox to have no exclusive content, nor did they ask for a 50% price hike on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Indeed, scepticism over the brand has been thoroughly earned in my view, but there are reasons to be optimistic. The rapidity of updates to the Xbox Ally platform, the big boost in performance for Xbox Cloud Gaming, and the masses of high-quality variety hitting Xbox Game Pass cannot be denied, despite the price hike.

Also, thanks to repeated miss steps Xbox has become a pariah brand over the last year. Admitting that you're an Xbox fan on social media automatically invites ridicule and hate, and that can't be healthy for the brand's future.

Can Microsoft turn it around before Valve's very similar Steam Machine platform takes off? Time is running out, potentially.

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