The Xbox brand is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, a key theme of its summer showcase. However, the brand has not exactly had a ton to celebrate lately. Following a huge splash with the original Xbox, a dominant generation with the Xbox 360, and a strong turnaround during the Xbox One era, the Xbox Series X/S have struggled to find an audience. Despite a spending spree that saw the platform acquire major publishers like Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, it has not translated into console sales.
While blame could be placed on any number of questionable initiatives and decisions, including but not limited to removing exclusivity from nearly all first-party games and conducting mass layoffs, Xbox seems intent on course-correcting to kickstart the new era following the departures of Xbox CEO Phil Spencer and president Sarah Bond, and the appointment of Asha Sharma. Small adjustments, such as allowing fans to vote for the type of stylization for the brand (resulting in it now officially being stylized as “XBOX”) and restoring exclusivity to games like Clockwork Revolution and Gears of War: E-Day, show a willingness to listen to fan feedback, but that alone won’t restore the platform to its former glory.
Thankfully, I recently had the chance to sit down with Xbox’s chief content officer and former head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty to talk about lessons learned from the past few years as well as future plans for the Xbox brand.
First of all, congratulations on an awesome showcase. It was really terrific seeing all of the projects you have on the horizon. Do you have any projects that are particularly near and dear to your heart?
I love all my children! [laughs] I would say it was really cool to see Gears of War get its day in the sun, right? The studio is just really special. There’s not a lot of new leaders there. The studio’s kind of been through a lot… just behind the scenes, they’ve been through a lot, and so, for them to really have this moment to show off everything they’ve been working on, I just think that’s really cool. And they’ve done a lot of things, and you’re probably somebody that picks up on this: One of the funnest things about watching the show is when you get those little, like, “Ah! Oh!” Those little “oohs” and “ahhs” on little gameplay things.
Like, in Gears, the team did so much work on the cover system. Things like vaulting and climbing and jumping – things that are just not really part of the Gears sort of movement vocabulary that they added. And when you’re watching the trailer, if you don’t play, you’re kind of like, “Oh, of course they do that.” But Gears people saw it! And, like, the whole incremental cover now, and the stuff we can do, and even in the trailer there’s stuff that didn’t really come through. So I was excited to see Gears. That was cool. It was a fun moment for the team. Then, obviously, having the Direct, too, was just a great opportunity for them to show off what they’ve been working on.
Gears of War: E-Day
As a huge Gears fan dating back to Day One, I am super excited to see it not only come back into the spotlight but also return to the team of Marcus and Dom, like in the early days. As much as I enjoy the new generation of characters, focusing on those two is such a nostalgic treat. Speaking of Gears, one of the big things to come out of the Showcase is that this Gears game, along with Clockwork Revolution, is part of this kind of revived sense of exclusivity with Xbox. What was the mission behind that?
A couple of things. First, we want there to be a reason for people to get excited about Xbox, a reason to buy an Xbox, a reason to become an Xbox fan. It’s just, there’s got to be a reason, and we want to make sure that that’s there. Second, as a reward for people that have stuck with us, it’s the 25th anniversary, which is pretty amazing, exciting, and there are people who have been with us from the beginning that we want to give them something. That’s why we’ve got Gears of War: E-Day coming in 2026 and Clockwork Revolution from our studio inXile in Irvine just down the road coming in 2027.
Was there any concern with the fact that we just finally got Gears over on PlayStation 5. I’m assuming people played the remaster of the original game, became fans of Gears, and now, suddenly, it’s not coming to PS5. Was there a concern about alienating that or a sense of pulling back from the road the platform was seemingly heading down?
Yeah, you know, we’ve had an opportunity with Asha coming in to really take a look at our strategy and, I’d say, put the focus on the future. I think that it’s that focus out of which that decision came.
Halo: Campaign Evolved
When you’re looking at the current state of Xbox, as you’ve mentioned, we’re entering this new era. We no longer have Phil. We don’t have Sarah here anymore. We have Asha, yourself, and a few other people who have been elevated into leadership roles. How would you define the current state of Xbox as a gaming platform?
Well, I can speak from my point of view, which is the content in the studios, and the cool thing about being part of a platform and not just the publisher is that we’ve got a front-row seat on the development of all the hardware, we’ve got a front-row seat to the strategy, and it’s really cool having our game teams work to feed, sort of, what they’re seeing, what they need, into the hardware team, and then also get previews of what’s coming back from the hardware team.
So, I guess, a lot of excitement about the future, and also you’ve seen the cadence that we’ve been able to get some things out on the platform side in terms of features, and that’s also showing up behind the scenes in terms of how we work with that side of the house. I think everybody’s excited. There’s a lot of good energy and, like I said, also a focus on the future. But I think it’s been true about us all along, just the fact that we’ve got these great first-party teams that can work hand-in-hand with the hardware teams.
You mentioned how this new era can be a reason for change, such as exclusivity returning for the future. You said “We want to make sure people have a reason to own an Xbox,” but are there any other lessons you’ve taken from the recent history?
We want there to be a reason to believe and a reason to buy Xbox, and for there to be a reward for our loyal fans, but the third one that brings together what you just talked about is clarity. We really want to get clear. So, we’ve [made] clear that we’ve got Gears of War: E-Day coming this year, we’ve got Clockwork coming next year. Our big multiplatform, multiplayer, live-service games, they’re going to stay that way. Commitments that we’ve made to ship games on other platforms that we’ve announced, of course, we’re going to honor those commitments. We’re not going to pull that back.
Going forward, we’re going to be really thoughtful about what we do. We want to make the right decision, not the fast decision. And I think, in general, you can look for us that when we put a date on something, we’re going to put a platform on it. So that’s going to be the approach. I think the thing that ties those two things together that you talked about is really a drive for that clarity.
Clockwork Revolution
To be clear, I think exclusivity is a smart decision for Xbox at this juncture. Though I was initially a fan of having the games everywhere, it does eliminate the need to have an Xbox in many cases. I think there’s a limit to it, but I also think it’s tough to put the toothpaste back in the tube after making a big show of eliminating exclusivity.
Looking at the Showcase overall, I’ve been doing this long enough to remember E3 press conferences and how Activision and Bethesda used to have their own distinct shows. Now, they’re all under the Xbox banner, which results in a fleshed out content offering and Showcase, but has also had some struggles like layoffs, how do you assess the studio acquisition spree we saw a few years ago now that we’re facing the results of that?
We’ve been pretty sequential and deliberate about it. It’s been a thoughtful process. From where I sit, I really tend to focus on just where we are, which is the stewards of over 20 IP that have made a billion dollars in their lifetime. So, that’s quite a lineup of things, and if we think that games are becoming the foundation of modern entertainment, then I think that puts us in good shape, right?
My job is to wake up every day and think about what could be in the way of these guys making great games, and how can I get that out of the way? I mean, that really is my job at the end of the day, and so I just consider myself so lucky to work with all these leaders, everyone from Kayleen Walters, who runs Minecraft, and the team looking over Call of Duty, we’ve just got such great leaders everywhere here, so that’s where I get focused on. And I think that going forward that the IP and the slate of characters and worlds and stories is going to be really important, and I think we’ve got a great lineup.
So, when you talk about the acquisitions and then some other things, my job is on the content side, and I just say, “Boy, are we lucky that we have just got this amazing collection of studios and amazing collection of IP.”
On the studio side, I did want to bring up one that I think a lot of people were really excited for, and then we got some disappointing news about it. It was actually a homegrown studio: The Initiative. Can you talk me through what went wrong there and why we never saw anything come to fruition from that studio?
Yeah, just out of respect for the team – and I really mean that – I’m not going to get into the gears inside the machinery on that one. I think let’s be respectful to the team, you know? We always have to evaluate projects, we’ve got a responsibility to run a business, and we’ve always got to look at things, and that was a decision that we had to make.
The logo for the now-canceled Perfect Dark game from The Initiative
With Asha taking over and there’s this feeling of change in the air around Xbox, do you see the future of Xbox Game Studios being more of those style of homegrown studios or more acquisitions?
Right now I’m just focused on what we’ve got. We’ve got a really amazing lineup, and just, if you think about the year that we’ve had, and I’ll go back to everything that Blizzard announced starting out the year; it was really the spring of Blizzard. And then, we got into Forza Horizon 6, which has been doing really, really well. Great to see the fans resonating with that. We have Halo: Campaign Evolved, and Minecraft Dungeons II coming this fall. We’ve got Gears of War: E-Day, then an amazing Modern Warfare 4. It’s so great to see fans reacting to that positively.
I feel really good about that. And then, of course, we have the other stuff that we slated for 2027, starting with Fable early in the year, right? So that’s a lot, and that’s where my focus is right now.
As you list those off, I can’t help but notice a lot of these are beloved Xbox properties that maybe haven’t been in the forefront lately, like Halo, Gears, and Fable. Was that a deliberate choice to coincide with the 25th anniversary, wanting to pay homage to the brand’s roots, or was that a coincidence?
Well, a little bit of magic, a little bit of mystery, right? [laughs] It always brings these together! Games are very complicated to make, you know. I think we’re fortunate that we had these things line up. I didn’t come up with this saying, but somebody pointed out to me, just as you did, that we’ve got Fable, Halo, Gears, and Forza in the same year. They called it the Mount Rushmore of gaming. I’m not going to be that presumptuous to say that it’s that, but it’s kind of cool that they all lined up this way, and it’s just a fantastic opportunity to celebrate the 25th anniversary.
Forza Horizon 6
Looking at Xbox currently, and I don’t know if you want to attribute this to the lack of exclusives or something else, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s been a bit of a downturn for Xbox in terms of console popularity. How do you compete going forward?
Well, you know, Asha has laid it all out: It’s great that she’s got the vision. You just start to think about things like the return of Xbox, great games, celebrate the players and the fans, and that’s the recipe, right? And my job very specifically is to land the great games part, and also how we can help with the return of Xbox with things like Gears exclusive and Clockwork exclusive. But I think that’s the recipe.
Looking at the current landscape of gaming, it feels like the Xbox Series S finds itself between a rock and a hard place. Game consoles have been getting more expensive due to a confluence of factors. It’s great that Xbox has this less expensive option in the Series S, but as the technology has gotten older, we’ve seen more developers, like the teams behind No Rest for the Wicked and Baldur’s Gate 3, blame the Series S’s shortcomings for their games not coming to Xbox. What is the strategy for the Series S, because you probably want to keep that cheaper option for players, but does that end up costing Xbox some great games in the long run?
You know, my job as the leader who’s got the privilege of working with our first-party studios is to really be, kind of, I’ll call it, like, a lighthouse, or lead the way. All our teams are committed to shipping great versions on Series X, great versions on Series S, great versions on PC, and on PC, doing our best to make sure that we can have settings that take the best advantage of the most killer rig ever, and also have settings that let a more average PC look fantastic. So, we’re pretty committed to solving those problems, and I hope that sort of shows a path for other developers to do the same thing.
Xbox’s upcoming slate of Game Pass titles
What is the strategy for Game Pass going forward? How do you preserve that value proposition and avoid having to raise the price like we saw last year?
I think the great thing about us as a platform is that it just comes back to the fact that we want to have many ways to play. If you want to buy the game, great. If you want to subscribe, that’s also worked out well for us. We also have cloud, right? We’ve also got supporting handhelds. It gets a little bit back to what you were talking about: some of the challenges in the industry with affordability around hardware. I think that’s what’s important for us: to make sure we provide a bunch of options.
Since you mentioned cloud gaming, do you anticipate any further pullback on exclusivity that would impact things like cloud gaming on Smart TVs or mobile devices, or a withdrawal from PC?
When we say “console exclusives,” it means Xbox console. It’ll still show up on all the normal places where we sell the PC version, and our cloud. Wherever you can get Xbox Cloud streaming.
If you missed Xbox’s big summer showcase, you can see our full recap here.
