Anyone who has to spend any time navigating corporate life will look at news stories like this and wearily crack a wry smile. Why? Because we have all been in the kind of meetings that must have taken place around this kind of nonsense, Microsoft switching back to the Xbox brand.
You can picture it now. Marketing executives, from the second-most colonised department beyond HR, having brought their particular brand of insanity to the proceedings, will have been furiously backpeddling in the face of hard data and a requirement for some accountability. Senior leaders, isolated from the details, making snap decisions. I can almost visualise it, play-by-play.
The result of all that huffing and puffing? A failed experiment and now having to send for some sensible people to pick up the pieces and declare that Microsoft Gaming is dead.
Or, to be precise, the branding is dead.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma apparently told an internal town hall of employees that the experiment with Microsoft Gaming is over, and from now on, all gaming activity will return to being under the Xbox brand, and the gaming division shall henceforth go back to being called Xbox.
It wasn’t broken, probably shouldn’t have tried to fix it.
A report in The Verge (via Dark Horizons) says that Sharma put it succinctly:
“Xbox needs to be our identity.”
Microsoft Gaming was created to move away from what they had clearly viewed as the restrictions of the Xbox brand, following their acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The planm, in pure corporate speak, was to better align Microsoft’s gaming activity across Xbox, PC, mobile, and the cloud.
Not anymore. Now it is all back under the Xbox brand, and let’s not talk about the strategic FUBAR anymore, OK? A website message says that this move will allow them to:
“…re-evaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI, and share more as we learn and decide…”
This all comes as rumors circulate that their acquisition of the studio behind Call Of Duty has not been the success they quite hoped for. Meanwhile, the world understands that gaming was never better than when it was the domain of enthusiastic but socially challenged guys slinging code in their sheds and basements.
