Regardless of what Xbox tries to do, the marketing behind it leaves a lot to be desired. Price hikes and confusing announcements may have damaged the Xbox brand beyond repair, and even Mike Ybarra, someone who was once at the core of helping make those decisions, is now on the outside looking in and wondering what the hell is going on.
The former Microsoft and Blizzard executive took to Twitter over the weekend and shared some deep thoughts about his feelings about the current state of the Xbox and where it might be headed. Ybarra's post is in response to a question that put Windows on the ROG Ally X, and that the new Xbox-branded PC handheld should be clearly partitioned and allow users to access the Xbox OS directly.
Mike Ybarra calls Xbox to get his house in order
Ybarra begins with a defense of Xbox, noting that focusing on making great games and embracing Steam is a “nice strategy.” In some ways, that seems to be what Xbox is trying to do. In others, however, it feels like Xbox is headed in a completely different direction. That's where the confusion comes in, and that's why Ybarra has criticized the company he once helped build.
Ybarra is laying into the “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign, which Xbox has leaned on again quite heavily since the launch of the Xbox Ally and more expensive Ally X. “Xbox is about games – games always rule the world. And if they don't have parity between the console and some other 'device'… it's just not an Xbox,” Ybarra writes. “Whoever came up with this is clearly not playing games.”
Xbox's reluctance to fully break free from being a hardware-driven video game company when so much of what it's done in the past 12 months or more has shown that's exactly where it's headed is the focus of Ybarra's criticism. “Only an idiot would continue to make console hardware when all the games are (or will be) going third-party,” the post reads. Don't hold back, Mike.
As it stands, Halo is pretty much the only true Xbox exclusive left-handed, and it almost certainly seems more a matter of when rather than if Master Chief debuts on Xbox with Combat Evolved remake rumors picking up steam. Ybarra goes on to say that if Xbox plans to reconnect with hardware and bring back its exclusives, that's fine, but that doesn't seem to be the plan.
Instead, it continues to “continue to run in the middle”, putting its games on rival platforms while denying claims that it is looking for a way out of the home console business. Confusing messages across the board are driving people away from Xbox, to the point that someone who worked at a high level at the company, arguably at its best, is watching, unafraid to publicly comment on how bad it looks from an outsider's perspective.
- Stamp
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Microsoft
- Original release date
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November 10, 2020
- Original MSRP (USD)
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$499 USD
- Operating system
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Proprietary (Windows based)
- Processor
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Custom AMD 8-core Zen 2 3.8 GHz
- Resolution
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720p – 4K UHD
