This is the most important showcase in Xbox history

In theory, Microsoft is approaching this week’s Summer Game Fest and the annual Xbox showcase on June 9 from a position of fantastic strength: Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard has boosted the revenues of its gaming division and turned it into a super publisher. the gaming industry has never seen. It now owns an astonishing war chest of hall-of-fame gaming properties including Call of Duty, Minecraft, Warcraft, Halo, Fallout, Diablo, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, Gears of War, Forza and many, many more.

Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer and his team are also well prepared to make a strong impression in what looks to be a fallow year for the rest of the industry. Sony, having already admitted that PlayStation won’t see any major exclusive releases this year, went out early last week with a short, low-key showcase. Nintendo has delayed its successor for the Switch until 2025; at its own showcase later in June, it will be forced to lean on the games it was able to scrape together for the Switch’s final holiday season. And Summer Game Fest MC Geoff Keighley has tempered expectations for his roundup showcase on June 7.

Microsoft has faced similar disruptions to its release schedule in the recent past, but in this regard it is now simply too big to fail. On the Activision Blizzard side, Microsoft will proclaim its ownership of Call of Duty with a special showcase showcasing the BlackOps6and could point to big expansions this year for both World of Warcraft And Diablo 4. Bethesda has Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to show, plus a possible Starfield expansion and a new game in the heavily rumored Doom series. Meanwhile, Xbox Game Studios is reportedly ready to unveil a new Gears of War and show off more of it Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and Obsidian fantasy role play Granted.

The fact that one of these three powerful gaming brands also appears on game consoles almost seems like an afterthought. But this is precisely Microsoft’s problem – or at least one of its problems – as it prepares to make this crucial speech to fans. In 2024, Xbox is in the grip of a deep identity crisis.

The Xbox fandom and the broader gaming community have been shocked in recent months by reports that Microsoft (which already publishes all its games simultaneously on Xbox and PC) planned to delve deeper into multiplatform publishing by bringing previously console-exclusive titles to the market to bring. on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5. Microsoft ultimately did just that Pentiment, HiFi rush, Sea of ​​thievesAnd Groundedbut reports remain that many larger properties – incl Starfield, the Indiana Jones game and franchise gems like Halo are also on the table. Windows Central reports that there is “no red line” for this initiative, codenamed Latitude, and that more PlayStation versions of Xbox games are in development.

The move has a simple business purpose – to increase profit margins on Microsoft’s in-house games in a challenging market – but it completely upends a fundamental marketing strategy for console gaming, in which a platform’s value and desirability are closely tied with its exclusive games. This has become a tenet of almost religious belief for gamers, and the suggestion that it could be abandoned is staggering.

The context for Microsoft’s decision is also important. With the move to PC, cloud gaming, mobile and subscription services with Game Pass, and by purchasing MinecraftMicrosoft clearly indicates that it has been thinking outside the boundaries of Xbox consoles for a decade. But the Activision Blizzard acquisition went even further by turning the company into a massive multi-platform publisher overnight.

Image: Treyarch, Raven Software/Activision

Thanks to regulators, Microsoft couldn’t make Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive, even if that made sense (it doesn’t). It couldn’t be more likely that this would do the same to Blizzard’s games. Much of Microsoft’s gaming business is now on PlayStation, Nintendo and PC, and that will undoubtedly change the strategic thinking of the Xbox leadership.

But while Microsoft’s gaming horizons have expanded, the same can’t be said for the Xbox platform itself. According to analysts quoted in the Financial Times, the Xbox Series games company. It does report numbers for Game Pass, but only occasionally; after a period of rapid growth, the service appears to have stabilized somewhat at 34 million subscribers.

There are even more troubling signs. In early 2024, Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees in its gaming division. This was very bad, although in line with the rest of the gaming industry, and perhaps not the worst. That came in May, when the company closed several Bethesda studios, including Arkane Austin (Dishonored, Redfall) and Tango Gameworks (The evil within, HiFi rush). The closures brought back uncomfortable memories of Microsoft’s failed management of other studios in the past, especially Fable developer Lionhead, which closed in 2016.

Image: Microsoft

The cumulative effect of all this is to raise huge existential questions for the Xbox and for Microsoft’s gaming ambitions. What is Xbox now? Are the consoles even important? Is Microsoft now just a huge third-party publisher – a bigger EA? Does the Game Pass strategy work? How does owning Call of Duty help with this? How did Halo, Xbox’s flagship franchise, fall into decline? And, perhaps most worryingly for players outside the Xbox community, can Microsoft be trusted to keep an eye on this vast empire and manage all these beloved properties and legendary studios responsibly, without causing irreparable damage as we saw with Fable and Lionhead?

On Sunday, Spencer and his team will have to do something much more nuanced and challenging than just release a megaton of game announcements. They need to organize all this greatness into a cohesive vision for Xbox’s place in the industry, its relationship with fans, and its strategy for the future. They need to be extremely clear in their messaging about exclusivity for all upcoming games. They need to show commitment to Game Pass (this is where Call of Duty comes in – with regulators pushing for the series to remain available on rival cloud services and consoles, Game Pass is the only strategy game open to Microsoft with CoD) . And they need to show commitment to console hardware; the unveiling of a new handheld would go a long way here.

To be fair to Xbox management, these are uncharted waters. No one has ever tried to combine the roles of platform holder and third-party publisher before, and whether this move makes sense at all remains an open question. On Sunday, Microsoft needs to show the gaming community why it was worth doing, and how it will create a better future for both the industry and the art form – instead of just eating them and ruining them.