During a meeting with all the employees of the team held in Redmond, XBOX CEO Asha Sharma today took stock of the year of profound transformation experienced by the brand, revealing that, after a period of decline described as a real free fall, XBOX has started to grow again, and outlined the priorities for the future: from the strengthening of the current XBOX Series X|S to XBOX Helix, the next generation that will not be a single hardware but an entire family of devices. The transcript of the meeting was leaked externally and has been verified by reliable sources.

Sharma, who arrived at the helm of the division in the spring, opened her speech by questioning the raison d'être of the brand: "Why do we exist? We exist to be the place where the world plays, we will know we have succeeded when we reach a billion active people every day, and we have the right to win because now we are focused on our fans and our franchises".

A statement that comes at the end of months that are anything but simple. This year XBOX has in fact gone through a sort of reset between sales, layoffs and structural changes: Call of Duty has exited XBOX Game Pass, which has simultaneously benefited from a significant price cut, the brand has returned to focus on exclusive games and content and, for the first time in years, has started to invest again in marketing and new features for the XBOX Series X|S consoles. During the summer, the waves of layoffs were numerous, as part of a broad effort to subtract the business from the ever-increasing costs of Microsoft's bureaucracy. With this in mind, some XBOX studios have been moved under internal publishers, others have been sold and still others closed: sensational was the news of the move of the Halo brand within Activision, leaving Halo Studios to a handful of employees (it is said between 20 and 30) who are only responsible for following existing games.

Sharma did not hide the starting situation: at the beginning of the year XBOX was down on all fronts, from hours of play to the number of users, to revenues. According to the CEO, the previous strategy linked to XBOX Game Pass had plunged the accounts into free fall, in all likelihood in reference to the damage suffered by both Call of Duty and the service itself. Today the hours of play have stabilized and, after a series of year-on-year declines, the brand has returned to growth. "We are making the right decisions to reinvest in the business: after hitting an all-time low, we have started to return to growth, at a rate two to three times higher than before, and we expect this trend to continue," Sharma explained.

Among the positive signs mentioned are the excellent debuts of Gears of War: E-Day, Minecraft Dungeons 2 and World of Warcraft Forever, to which is added a 30% increase in positive sentiment towards the brand over the last year.

The course for the future is based on what Sharma called the "four Cs": core, content, creation and connection. The first pillar coincides precisely with consoles: according to the CEO, XBOX's market position requires investing even more in this area, despite the fact that the segment as a whole is not growing within the gaming industry, because the room for growth still exists. Sharma was also very clear on another point: XBOX does not have the right to expand beyond the console if it is not able to serve its most valuable players in the right way. This is a decisive return to the brand's historical audience, that of console owners, whose abandonment had become unsustainable at the beginning of the year, when Microsoft seemed to favor the number of online users, regardless of the platform, to the detriment of the present reality. An alternative growth that, with the old strategy, never materialized.

The strengthening of Gen-9, or XBOX Series X|S, passes according to Sharma through innovations such as XBOX Cloud Gaming, the disc-to-digital game conversion program and the expansion of XBOX Play Anywhere. The CEO also hinted that XBOX Game Pass will become more flexible for a greater number of users, confirming what has already been suggested in the past: in the future we will be able to customize exactly the type of content we want to access within the service.

The focus then shifted to the Gen-10, XBOX Helix, which Sharma described as a family of devices: "For the Gen-10 we are moving to a family of devices. There is no single device that will fit everyone. We will certainly have a great console first and foremost, but we also know that many players will be on the move. There are things that we are the best in the world at producing, and others for which we will rely on partners. We will share more details as our plans develop. The operating system is starting to look really good, and we are very excited about it."

Ample space also on the PC front, with XBOX PC and Battle.net. Sharma expressed his intention to grow Battle.net as a platform, pointing out that it is now almost on par with the main competitor store in terms of user loyalty, and added that the recent collaboration with CD Projekt RED, which brought games like The Witcher 3 to Battle.net, is destined to expand further. "We're going to do it in the right way for those communities," he specified, hinting that Battle.net will remain a more curated and selected store than other digital stores for PC, XBOX PC included.

The CEO then revealed that XBOX PC is the first store for PC gaming in China, although the figure may not take into account Chinese users who access other digital stores via VPN. Sharma also confirmed that XBOX will continue to invest in other third-party PC platforms where there is a well-defined audience.

Finally, there is a novelty that closely concerns developers: XBOX is rationalizing the APIs necessary to publish games on its platforms, so as to make it easier to release titles on XBOX Series X|S, XBOX Helix and XBOX PC, an aspect that has long been a sore point.

Despite the many encouraging signs that emerged from the speech, Sharma still urged caution, citing the state of the economy, the so-called RAMpocalypse linked to the soaring costs of memory and the generalized shake-up that the entire entertainment sector is going through. We can't wait to find out what news XBOX has in store for us!