The origin of evil
We start with a little confidence, I arrived in the video game industry precisely at that time, 10 years ago, just before this famous schism which jostled Xbox's strategy.So I saw this transformation with my own eyes.I saw a serious challenger at the end of the Xbox 360 period, a number 2 that has everything to gain by playing big, becoming a mocked outsider, and ridiculed by its competitor, at the start of the Xbox One.(Transcription of Panthaa's experience)
During this period, Xbox, the Gaming Cool Division and close to the public returned from 5 years of Calvary, a Microsoft by-product, thought to dominate without necessarily having weapons or skills.Like what the American brand had done with Windows, Microsoft wanted with the Xbox One Investing massively, but this time the target was not the PC players but their living room.The Xbox One had to be much more than a simple game console, it had to be an ultra-connected media center.This is how Microsoft bet on Kinect omniscience, its movement detection tool, a casual accessory from the front generation, which returned to the front of the stage as an extension of the controller.The cool side is that it seemed innovative and really efficient for the time, the bad side, is that in addition to being seen as very intrusive for people's privacy, Kinectrestes a motion gaming accessory, an object a little exceeded at the time when the players wanted above all very powerful consoles ... Including it basic with the console obviously increases the price of the Xbox One of € 100.Suffice to say that release a less efficient console, more expensive than the direct competitor, already a market leader, is called industrial suicide.
As if that were not enough, communication around the Xbox brand was also completely above ground during this period.Microsoft has completely lost the sense of realities, to the point of losing its audience.Through pride and because they may have known the business than video games, the brand's spokespersons made many dumplings.Microphone uproot to launch a spade to journalists, excluding declarations for the public who at that time no stable and high speed internet connection: Xbox collects the pans in the first half of the years 2010.For his part, Sony evolves.The biggest consequence is that the public no longer follows them ... Xbox may try to maintain the flame with its community, it does not work and even creates superb fairly uncomfortable sequences, as in this Paris Games Week whereThe room drivers ask to chant "it's Xbox X" without being followed by the crowd.
So what to do?What to do when your product is expensive, mocked, badly optimized, that your catalog is criticized, that your communication is in the west, and that you go straight in the wall having signed for 7 years?The answer is in two words: Phil Spencer.
The analysis that will save Xbox
Phil Spencer is the man who will come out Xbox from the limbo and bring the brand again to the podium.Phil Spencer is a player, he is passionate, he is close to the public, he has excellent ideas, an excellent team, and he has the confidence of the boss of Microsoft, Satiya Nadella.He will then replace the brand on the global chessboard and to do this, he will operate as theorized marketing: a Swot matrix.Identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.To put it simply, the result is as follows: in force, Xbox has an unlimited check book, servers in a mess thanks to Azure, the flagship service of Microsoft.On the weaknesses, the catalog is fallible, not very diverse, and during this same period, the Lionhead studio which has made Microsoft pride with the fable series, has arrived out of breath.Overall Microsoft mainly has American-centered games: whether Halo and Gears, or evenforza, and the rest is not very seller.We will have to rearm all this, internalize studios and weave a network of partners in the future.
The opportunities that Phil Spencer detects are on the other hand incredibly promising: gaming is becoming a field or the lack of inclusiveness and accessibility are very criticized, video games as a major leisure generates more money,But remains a very excluding sector and not super open.There is a blow to play on it, Spencer is convinced of it.Also, they press the potential of cloud gaming, and the advent of subscription catalogs, which revolutionized the music, cinema and series industry.At the rank of threats, it is especially the time that plays against him, the Xbox One is signed for a given period, generally on a console cycle, people invest for 7 years, before a new machine makes them look at themMore opportunities.The One being a fiasco day one, it will be necessary to find a parade to reverse the steam and it will be necessary to do it quickly, at mid-generation.And then there is this terribly bad image that Phil Spencer and his teams must urgently modify.He realizes, people do not want an omniscient microsoft machine in their living room, they want a powerful machine thought by the players, for the players for the players.Xbox must become the “good guy” of video games, and this involves a global strategy, supported by adequate communication.In the ear of Satya Nadella, boss of Microsoft, he whispers his plan, and obtains full powers to carry it out.
The 12 works of Phil
Phil Spencer is a good speaker, he is smiling, and if you follow him on social networks or interview, you feel automatically that the gentleman is a passionate player, invested with a mission in which he believes.He will refound the communication around the brand, congratulate studio buyouts even when it comes to direct competitors, react very regularly on the outings of the moment and does not hesitate to answer on Twitter if you ask him a question.Upon his arrival, he seizes and embodies the brand, so that today, we are worried by wondering who could take the torch when he leaves.On the strategy side, to raise the brand, it will focus on 3 points: power, catalog and features.
By creating the One X, then the Xbox series, Xbox recovers its image as a powerful and well designed product architect.The two machines shine by their engineering, the Xbox are the most powerful on the market.In this way, Phil Spencer erases the image of the One, a real massive magnetoscope with unsatisfactory performance. Là, c’est les millions de Microsoft, injectés dans la R&D, la recherche et développement, qui permettent de bâtir, en toute transparence avec les professionnels du hardware et de la tech, des châssis adulés et respectés par les analystes.On the public side, by buying Xbox, from the One X, we know that we acquire a powerful product, at the almost unprecedented value for money in the industry.Xbox sells at a loss and puts the maximum to satisfy players, technologically speaking.It even integrates the most invested players at the heart of the strategy by offering them an insider program so that they can participate in the development of software.In this way, he reconnects with the community and puts the first stones to a relationship of trust.The second crucial point is obviously the catalog.Phil Spencer will convince Satya Nadella to bring the ticket board to add to the studios portfolio in the Xbox family colossal.It is more than 23 entities that constitute the Xbox galaxy, so many studios capable of getting out of various games, having a certain latitude to make them, and to go and touch all kinds of audiences, from the Western to the Japanese public, even if it is still one of the most difficult markets to penetrate.From console to PC, from RTS to indie games, Xbox wants to be everywhere and capitalizes on its ID@Xbox program to unite emerging studios at its DNA.
Finally, the third point of catchphrase is the features, and if you have an Xbox Series, you know the importance of the Quick Resume, this feature allowing the machine to pause several games in a row, history ofcome back at the exact time you had left your game previously.This is one of the points that forged Xbox's “good guy” image, because the company thinks of players and seeks to make their lives easier, beyond what the specifications of a machine impliesplaying.In the same way, the retrocmpatibility aims to show that Xbox is due to the history of video games with a big h.Red Dead Redemption has made a facelift on one x for free, where competition tends to charge these patches, where outright out of the remaster that is not really at a high price.The investment of all this, the money that Xbox literally throws in this kind of practice to buy its status as a major actor in the hearts of the players, it is image construction, a manly spent way to manufacture aaura, that of a players' business, which wishes to preserve the heritage of the medium.The recent FPS Boost, a feature that improves the refreshment of image of old games, also goes completely in this direction and aims to preserve the games of yesteryear to make them more appreciable with the standards of today.A real crusade for the democratization of the game and for its preservation as an art, which Xbox ardently leads.Obviously, this practice does not bring them a round, it is above all an image story, aimed at seducing, to recover players.
But where Xbox may go a little too far in its initiative, it is when the company draws a rupture strategy, in order to bypass its primary concern: being number 2.Because it should not be forgotten, Xbox remains above all Microsoft, and the multinational wishes to go always further on the markets it invests.If Phil Spencer's Swot matrix blowed her that the subscription catalogs and the Cloud Gaming had to invest, it is also to put to PlayStation carpet on her own ground.
Missing to put the other at a carpet
A breakup strategy is a strategic circumvention.See that a fight is lost in advance, flee the versus, and go to mount a +10 armor to come back stronger than ever.This is what Xbox preferred from 2015, by working the Cloud Gaming and the Gamepass.The Cloud is the decentralization of the experience, which turns on servers and is served to you anywhere, no matter your terminal of play.The Game Pass is the subscription catalog, a real Netflix of the video game.Associated, these two services form an extremely expensive whole to put in place, but which once the critical mass of subscribers has reached, will generate a monstrous financial windfall, in addition to making the rest of the market archaic.It’s a big bet, and as much to tell you that without the almost unlimited cash of Microsoft, it was a plan dedicated to failure.But fortunately, it was Microsoft who launches the project and Phil Spencer at the approval of the big boss, Satya Nadella who invested massively in the servers with Azure.
To succeed, Microsoft needs to federate, gather in order to win later by seducing PC players, who are massively on Steam, and console players who are on the PlayStation ecosystem.Thanks to the GamePass on PC, Phil Spencer plays the “Good Guy” card, offering a constantly fueled catalog whose Steam players will be able to enjoy in addition, a hyper profitable investment for them since lots of new games arrive Day One, without additional cost, accompanying a substantial catalog back.To restore the image of Xbox, Phil Spencer pushes the integration of players of all horizons a little further.By launching the Adaptive Controller controller, aimed at facilitating the lives of players suffering from disability, Xbox ennobles a little more its vision of gaming: affordable, inclusive and now more accessible.Again, this is more the image that we are targeting, rather than profitability, which pushes the leader, PlayStation, also worked to make his games more accessible.The “good guy” of video games therefore pushes others to upgrade, to make the medium something more open regardless of the platform on which we play.
The GamePass, which has become an emblem of cheap and quantity video games, forced the hand to PlayStation so that Sony does the same.The recent overhaul of the Playstation plus is an example: this is a more shy answer, but it is still a response.PlayStation was forced to get wet in the deep end, making its cloud gaming offer and catalog an essential component of the PlayStation Plus, then attacking its usual profitability model that made its success.By modifying its offer, PlayStation is forced to take risks.The risk of passing afterwards, with a less attractive offer, and the risk also of undermining its profitability by giving cards to the players, who will now be less inclined to buy the game by unit in decent volume, which is the'One of Sony's main sources of income for 20 years now.
Where Xbox goes too far and betrays Microsoft's ambitions a little, it is when the company questions the importance of game consoles.Because, in a few years, because or thanks to Xbox and its different democratization strategies, the game console as it is currently designed will be only a distant memory.
Good Guy but not too much anyway ...
From good guy to video game gravediger as a material art, there is indeed only one step for Xbox.The company is owned by a GAFAM, as we recall, that is a megacorporation for which profitability remains a major objective.Following the fight lost in advance 10 years ago, Xbox may have dominated the cloud market in cloud in a few years, accessible everywhere, then buried consoles de facto.MP3 readers or record turntables have been killed by streaming services on phone and connected objects.DVD/ Blu Ray readers have taken a huge blow with the SVOD services directly integrated into connected TVs.And video games as we know it may be drowned under a flow of cloud offers by subscription directly injected on TV connected.This is Xbox's bet 2022, to integrate the GamePass into TV, and on front, we find Nvidia, PlayStation, Google or Amazon.Certainly everything is not yet all pink for the cloud, but the market is on the way, and it evolves quickly, both technically speaking, as in terms of installation.Will it work?Only the future will tell us, but one thing is certain, the “good guy” strategy of Xbox and its desire to impose an affordable and accessible video game on a majority of terminals, may well position the brand in leader'Here a few years, whether it is by the hegemony of the console gamepass and PC locally, thanks to its off -competition budgets, or by the omnipresence of the latter thanks to the Cloud which will make us forget the importance of buying a console.
The 2015 bypass is therefore started, it begins to bear fruit, and the “Good Guy” is on the right track to change things, putting a little blow behind the neck at the Occasions Games as well as tohardware manufacturers who will therefore have to get used to its cadence.So, "Good Guy", but how far and for how long?What will happen to "players" politics when Phil Spencer has left the boat?The future of Xbox and the posture it has successfully camped in recent years will they go in the same direction as today?
