Microsoft recently did something very strange and nuked all mentions of the 2024 “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign from its website. The Xbox Wire post about the initiative is gone, too, but you can still watch the video on YouTube. A report by The Information assigned credit for that move to new Xbox boss Asha Sharma. Microsoft has now done another weird thing and publicly acknowledged that.
“Asha retired ‘This is an Xbox’ because it didn’t feel like Xbox,” an unnamed Microsoft spokesperson told Windows Central in a statement on Friday. “She is personally leading a reset of how we show up as a brand.”
It’s not every day a gaming company comes out and confirms an executive did something and why they did it. This is of a piece with how Microsoft has pitched the Sharma takeover more broadly: as an outsider coming in with fresh ideas to revive the classic spirit of Xbox from its early days.
But it’s still odd to see Microsoft pointing at the “This is an Xbox” campaign as if it was something foisted on the company and not a product of its own sprawling divisions and their competing business goals. The slogan may have been bad but the rationale was clear: Microsoft is a cloud computing company, so let’s get more people to play games in the cloud and use the company’s popular consumer gaming brand to make that happen.
“This is an Xbox” was not born in a vacuum. Even if it was one person’s idea, which is hard to believe, it was created in response to incentives within the company to fit certain square-shaped pegs into circle-sized holes. That broader context includes Microsoft’s need to feed its insatiable Azure cloud and its increasingly strict profit margin discipline.
Did Xbox ditch its work on a living-room set top box for streaming Game Pass games and a dedicated gaming handheld because it wanted to go all-in on Xbox agnosticism? Or did “This is an Xbox” spin out of the fact that Microsoft decided to kill those initiatives because gaming hardware was continuing to flounder?
Sharma’s mandate to “lead a reset” at Xbox presumes she is free from the same contradictions and conundrums that plagued her predecessors. But so far, everything we know about Project Helix, the successor to the Xbox Series X/S, indicates that the company’s next-gen gaming strategy remains as ambitious and confusing as it sounded in early reporting around this time last year. Somehow the forces driving that train seem like they’ll be harder to “retire” than a single tone-deaf slogan.