If Xbox is ‘recommitting’ to its console, what does that mean for its recent ‘everything is an Xbox’ strategy?

After struggling to compete with the PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, Microsoft’s gaming division has spent the last few years trying to remake the Xbox brand into a software label first and foremost: it started with Steam releases and cloud streaming, continued with the painful “This is an Xbox” ad campaign, and culminated in phrases like “We’re able to honor the Halo legacy on PlayStation” which could only be read as admissions of defeat. Now with the abrupt retirement of longtime boss Phil Spencer, incoming Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma has said that the company “will celebrate our roots with a renewed commitment to Xbox starting with console.”

What, exactly, does that mean for the last few years of Microsoft’s gaming strategy?

Maybe it means precisely nothing. It’s the sort of reassuring but nonspecific language we expect from executives who want to soothe fan (and more importantly, investor) worries that shit’s about to get cray cray. And Xbox leadership has repeatedly stated it will continue making consoles, though we have to imagine that the RAMpocalypse has made some plans that seemed on solid ground just a few months ago now much less certain.

The full text of Sharma’s introductory message to her team, made public on Microsoft’s blog, follows the carefully polished C-suite playbook of implying a bold sense of direction while committing to nothing in particular. In Sharma’s words, Microsoft Gaming will:

• “Recommit to our core Xbox fans and players” while also “enter[ing] new categories and markets where we can add real value”
• Move with “urgency because gaming is in a period of rapid change,” but also “not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop”
• “Celebrate our roots with a renewed commitment to Xbox starting with console” yet simultaneously “expand across PC, mobile and cloud … [and] break down barriers so developers can build once and reach players everywhere without compromise”
• “Return to the renegade spirit that built Xbox in the first place,” while Microsoft is worth some $3 trillion.

It seems very unlikely that the gaming division of a company so devoted to AI and cloud computing will pull back from putting its software on as many devices as possible to “recommit” to selling games on a single console. It seems just as unlikely that it would stop selling its PC games on Steam, when years of work on the Xbox app have yet to result in an interface that anyone particularly likes.

Perhaps there’s a hint here that Microsoft is ready to jettison its all-in-on-Game-Pass strategy, now that it’s abundantly clear the service will never pull in the tens of millions of anticipated subscribers and that it might have even cannibalized sales of the games Microsoft spent billions of dollars to acquire.

I mean, really, what else could Sharma’s statement “We are witnessing the reinvention of play” possibly mean?

Okay, it could mean literally anything.

But if I may pick out one single phrase that I think I can accurately translate from CEO speak into human language, it’s this line, from near the letter’s end:

“We will invent new business models and new ways to play by leaning into what we already have: iconic teams, characters, and worlds that people love. But we will not treat those worlds as static IP to milk and monetize. We will build a shared platform and tools that empower developers and players to create and share their own stories.”

Emphasis above is mine, and here’s what it means:

The kids love Roblox, and they make all the games themselves! How do we get a piece of THAT?