Microsoft’s multiplatform push and its promise that Project Helix will play PC games have left some core Xbox fans panicking about the platform’s pivot away from traditional console gaming. They might take comfort, then, in Xbox’s new chief strategy officer’s belief that console gaming remains “important, durable, and still growing.”
That was a sentiment Matthew Ball shared with Bloomberg today in some of his first on-the-record comments since joining Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s leadership team this week. He said his focus is on reviving storied franchises and strengthening Xbox’s console business, a mission he found “irresistible” as a long-time gamer with “thousands of memories in specific basements” playing Halo and Gears of War.
“Starry Night was one heck of a ride,” Ball later wrote on X, referencing a famous CG video for Halo 3. “Can picture the very moment.”
Both of those franchises dominated during the Xbox 360 era as Microsoft spearheaded the growth of online multiplayer gaming in the console space, but have seen their popularity erode in the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S generations. Halo Infinite was great but not a slam dunk, and Microsoft puled the plug on post-launch support just when its standalone multiplayer version was catching a second wind. Meanwhile, it’s been nearly seven years since Gears 5 released, despite an entire trilogy of games coming out in a similar time period during the Xbox 360 years.
2026 will be a year full of tests for these and other classic Xbox franchises. Halo: Campaign Evolved will bring Master Chief to PlayStation for the first time and kickstart the sci-fi shooter’s Unreal Engine era. Gears of War: E-Day is a prequel that goes back to the characters players originally fell in love with. It hasn’t yet been confirmed for PS5, and many fans are hoping it will come to Xbox first or remain entirely exclusive and mark a shift away from Microsoft’s recent multiplatform experiment.
Ball has sounded less bullish on console gaming in some of his past analyses. “The struggles of PlayStation (whose PS3 and PS4 have both fallen well short of PS2) and Xbox (which has never held more than a third of the console market, but usually ranges between a tenth and a sixth) also explain why there is now such focus on cross-platform publishing – most players are on other devices (including PC) and it’s no longer reasonable to bet you can attract them to yours, least of all in the tens of millions,” he wrote back in 2024.
Xbox under Sharma has been throwing a lot of bones to diehard console players these last couple of months, a stark departure from the recent “everything is an Xbox” marketing push of her predecessors. But it remains to be seen if this move is just savvy fan service or is backed up by concrete changes. The proof will be in the games and whether Microsoft can marshal its creative output into something that changes the broader momentum around Xbox as a machine that plays games in your living room.