By Paula Beaton At yesterday’s Xbox town hall meeting at Microsoft, Xbox boss Asha Sharma told employees that the brand has “started to return to growth.”
At the meeting, transcribed and shared by Windows Central, topics covered included how positive sentiment towards the brand has increased by 30% in the past year, with Sharma highlighting recent games that saw strong starts, such as World of Warcraft: Forever, Gears of War: E-Day, and Minecraft Dungeon 2.
A later update from Windows Central revealed that Sharma was using a chart relating specifically to first-party growth for games owned and published by Xbox when speaking about growth.
Sharma also spoke about why Xbox exists in the first place:
Why do we exist? We exist to be where the world plays, we will know when we have a billion daily active people, and we have a right to win because we’re now focused on our fans and franchises.”
At the latest Xbox town hall, we also heard that Xbox Game Pass could become “more flexible for more players,” allowing users to tailor content to suit their gaming needs.
Asha Sharma then spoke about the four C’s leading the Xbox brand in the future: core, content, creation, and connection. She mentioned that while PC remains a core focus for the brand, she’s keen to continue investing in consoles and believes there’s an opportunity for Xbox to grow in that space.
Since the Xbox town hall was an internal meeting for employees, we didn’t expect to hear much about Project Helix, Xbox’s next-gen console. However, it seems that the new console could be part of a “family of devices.” Asha Sharma said we should expect to see both first-party and third-party hardware, with more news on this “as plans develop.”
“We are moving to a family of devices for Gen-10. There is not one device that fits all. We will certainly have a great console first, but we also know that many players will be on the go. There are some things that we are the best in the world to manufacture, and there are other things that will we partner on. So, we will be sharing more about that as our plans develop. The operating system is starting to look really good. We’re very excited about this.”
Asha Sharma spoke about plans to grow Battle.net as a platform, revealing that it almost rivals Steam for user retention. “We will do it the right way for those communities,” she said, implying that we can expect Battle.net to retain its more curated feel rather than expanding into a platform like Steam.
This meeting comes hot on the heels of a positive statement by Asha Sharma in an interview with The New York Times earlier this week, confirming that Xbox is not for sale. Overall, Sharma’s town hall pitch was threaded with the same positivity, but still bore a note of caution on the challenges Xbox faces both currently and in the future, including the RAMpocalypse and the state of the economy.