The Xbox Rebuild

This past weekend, Microsoft held it’s first ‘XO’ event in several years. The announcement they made a few months back that the fan based event would be returning seemed like a response to Sony holding PSX events the past few years, to varying degrees of mostly positive success. It also sparked a slew of interest in why the Xbox front office decision makers picked this year to hold the resurrection of the event. It seemed like gaming and Xbox fans of all ilk were prognosticating what could come from the event, from new hardware details to completely unknown new exclusive games. As the two-hour livestreamed keynote(?), announcement thing carried on it became abundantly clear that not much was going to come of the event, announcement-wise at least. They foreshadowed what the big announcement was going to be and basically were circling in the air for an hour and a half until they could stick the landing at the end. The major news to emerge from the event was Microsoft, in conjunction with the acquisitions and new studios announced at E3, added two more studios under the first party banner. InXile, creators of Bards Tale and Wasteland among other old-school PC based RPG games as well as Obsidian who are behind plenty of pivotal RPGs like South Park The Stick of Truth, Fallout: New Vegas and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 became the two newest members this weekend. The show didn’t really amount to much, nothing overtly flashy or monumental stole the headlines. I tend to believe that if four studio acquisitions and the birth of a major new studio didn’t take place at E3, Microsoft announcing they have bought these two studios would have provided a little more of a buzz this past weekend. But that is hardly the point here. Anyone crazy enough as myself that spent a fine Saturday afternoon watching a Youtube stream of an Xbox only event that mostly acted as an ad reel may have started to see what was really going on here.

As a deeply engrossed baseball fan, a trend started to emerge at the turn of the decade. Back 7 years ago, the Cubs and Astros each underwent a complete revamping of how to build a baseball team. Both teams found success, in succession, following a similar path. That path started with taking it on the chin, understanding they weren’t competitive in the current market and building a stable of emerging talent ready to come up together to create a lasting, ultra-competitive future. Knowing way too much about the ins and outs of baseball gave me a particular insight that while watching the XO18 event kept flashing the similarities between the modern baseball rebuild and Microsoft's Xbox division.

The Xbox One is by no means a failure, it just couldn’t or didn’t find the eruption of unexpected success PlayStation did this generation. Some of that was self-inflicted for sure, it’s hard to forget the bizarre Summer of 2013 for Xbox, during what should be an exciting time announcing and showing new hardware, was marred with utter confusion on top of shoddy decision making. Once Phil Spencer took over, the identity started shifting with the Xbox brand, they were fighting for the players, trying to make consumer-friendly changes. Despite all the plus marks they added with things like Gamepass and backwards compatibility or changing the hardware fidelity conversation in their favor, they also made a slew of new game announcements only to see many of those games get canceled or held up in development abyss. PlayStation kept churning along, never losing ground and pumping out exclusive game of the year contenders. When Phil first emerged as the new face of Xbox I recall him clearly declaring he wants to right the wrongs of the Xbox One and plans on winning that arms race with Sony. The story is different now. They have all but given up competing with PlayStation and even Nintendo right now. They took it on the chin early in this generation and have realized they haven’t been and aren’t competitive in the current market.

This leaves them in a position to build their stable, stop relying on the old veterans that they have been riding going back to the original Xbox and bring fresh talent in ready to create that substantial competitive future. Microsoft is gearing up not for some big new Triple-A thing next year on the Xbox One, but to make sure that when new hardware is out and Sony is releasing Spider-man 2 they will have something to match. All these new studios give Xbox something they have been severely lacking and searching for, studio diversity. No longer are they overly reliant on shooters and pretty cars, they can have those stalwart titles but counterpunch the competition with story-based games, 3rd person action games, and RPGs. Xbox has already done a good job using the Xbox One as a test bed of sorts, seeing how players react to launching and consistently maintaining services like Gamepass, a gaming-centric Netflix service, and backwards compatibility, both of which garnering collective adoration since there respective releases. All that remains is to see if the calculated talent acquisitions turn into major league talent for Team Xbox as the next generation creeps ever closer.