Xbox

MS

Yesterday, there was controversy in XBOX land when it was revealed that Xbox would still include rival hardware logos like PlayStation in its trailers for its first-party, multiplatform games. The idea is that, with the promised “return to Xbox” and a focus on its community, this was a great offense.

The pushback was loud enough to cause new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to reply: “Seeing the feedback on logos. It was a miss, and I own it. We are talking about how we adjust for future XBOX shows.”

This feels like yet another iteration of Xbox fans complaining about issues that are incredibly small, while the huge issues remain to approach anything resembling a solution. This “should we show the PS5 logo at the end of a trailer of a game coming to PS5” controversy came alongside the news that one of Microsoft’s biggest games in years, Fable, was being delayed until 2027, an enormously more significant issue. And yet we have superfans saying things like “This logo issue is integral to XBOX growth.” Is it, really?

The most significant development since Sharma came on board was the reversal of the patently ridiculous 50% price hike of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate from $20 to $30 a month. Now it’s down to $23 at the cost of no longer offering the yearly Call of Duty installment in Game Pass at launch. A big move, but also fixing a blindingly obvious mistake.

But besides that? Xbox seems like it’s getting bogged down in relatively pointless minutiae. It has changed its formatting from Xbox to XBOX after the result of a Twitter poll. Its logo is green again. It is changing the playtime shown on the platform to read in hours instead of days.

I’ll go back to the public facing “request list” that Microsoft set up for fans to say what they wanted from Xbox going forward. The issues range from huge, sticky issues like a return to exclusives and free online multiplayer to making DLC a separate category for achievements and making an HDR dashboard.

Sharma has talked about “hard choices” coming for Xbox, which is somewhat ominous, but there is little indication how the biggest issues will be solved:

• How do you return to exclusive releases in a meaningful capacity with so many current and future (Fable) multiplatform games? Do you go back to picking and choosing? How many years will it take for this to start in earnest? Will there be huge exceptions like Elder Scrolls 6? Will this change the fact that you can also get any Xbox game instantly on PC, making nothing a “true” exclusive like Sony or Nintendo have?
• How do you plan to turn the bottomed-out Xbox hardware situation around? How will Project Helix solve this problem as a likely console/PC outside of a niche crowd that will no doubt be charged an enormous amount of money for such a system in the current climate where a Series X can cost $800?
• How do you continue to grow the bread and butter of the current Xbox plan, Game Pass, when subscriptions are ramming into a ceiling mainly due to its console install base, and this idea of widespread adoption of cloud gaming is not taking shape?

This idea of Sharma “owning” the pointless “mistake” of putting competitor logos at the end of game trailers, when they are in fact coming to those systems, and this would just be a way to hide that, feels like a metaphor for this whole thing. There are only so many easy nitpicks you can fix before you have to take on the real issues, and we have seen little evidence of much changing in that regard, just caps lock fonts and green logos. While this will take time, this eye-rolling placation of “problems” that don’t really even exist is doing nothing but obscuring the fact that these larger issues could take years to solve, if they’re ever solved at all.

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