What Microsoft means when it says ‘Xbox Everywhere’

Xbox Everywhere?

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is well known for this follow-through. Back in 2018, the exec, speaking to a crowd at a San Francisco business conference, said of the company’s Xbox Game Pass subscription service: “It started on console, it will come to PC and eventually it will come to every device.”

Back then, and with little knowledge of Spencer’s bonafides, that probably sounded a bit like corporate bravado falling somewhere between a long shot and wishful thinking. But Microsoft has proven that it has the resources and desire to deliver Game Pass “to every device,” which means Spencer’s long-term vision might be closer than we think.

“Xbox Everywhere.” That’s the nice, neat slogan Microsoft is now using to sum up its distribution ambitions. Ultimately, the company is not so much concerned with growing Game Pass as its singular hope for the future. Instead, the goal is to ensure that the Xbox audience includes as many possible customers.

• “As somebody sitting back and taking a longer-term view of where our business is going, you should look at that as a business model that we think scales to billions of people, not hundreds of millions of people like retail does,” Spencer said during that 2018 speech.
• Last week, Microsoft announced a partnership with Epic Games to deliver Fortnite to Xbox account owners with as little friction as possible, meaning you can play it on an iPhone, in a mobile web browser, without needing a Game Pass subscription.
• Microsoft says Fortnite is the first in a long string of free-to-play games it plans to deliver through cloud gaming. “As we look to make gaming more accessible to even more people, and reach the three billion players globally, we’ve invested heavily in the cloud,” said Xbox Cloud Gaming chief Catherine Gluckstein last week.

Microsoft dropped the Xbox from Game Pass. The company said last year it plans to bring Game Pass to streaming sticks and smart TVs, and that it would be developing its own hardware to help accelerate this shift. That way, a new customer could subscribe to Game Pass, hook up a controller and start playing, no Xbox required.

• Those devices might be coming this year, according to a report from VentureBeat last week. The first of these new hardware products could be a Microsoft-designed streaming box said to be somewhere between a Fire TV stick and a Roku puck.
• The first smart TV partner is reportedly Samsung, the report says. That means you won’t need a separate hardware device at all, and can launch Game Pass and cloud streaming straight from your TV.
• Cloud gaming, on multipurpose devices like phones and TVs, represents a major growth opportunity for Microsoft, considering Nintendo and Sony lag far behind in delivering games across platforms.
• “While console users represent the core of Microsoft’s service for example, its future growth will increasingly rely on converting non-console users through its streaming functionality,” wrote Ampere Analysis researcher Piers Harding-Rolls.
• “At some point in our future, more people are going to be part of the Xbox community on mobile than they are on any other device, just by the nature of how many mobile phones there are,” Spencer told Axios last year.

There are plenty of hurdles. Chief among them is connectivity concerns. Microsoft this weekend experienced a major Xbox outage that disrupted customers’ access to online services, including Game Pass and multiplayer, and even in some cases blocked authentication of digital games players had purchased and downloaded.

• For Microsoft to succeed, it’s going to need a much more straightforward system of digital rights management and an authentication system that can help players navigate an increasingly messy digital library, especially if the intent is to use streaming to help convert customers into future Xbox owners.
• Subscription gaming isn’t a slam dunk, at least not for certain types of games like Fortnite and other free-to-play titles. Recent data on the subscription and cloud gaming market also underlines how small a portion of the global games market it represents, meaning Microsoft isn’t quite ready for these business models to go mainstream.
• Sony’s more understated PlayStation Plus revamp and its rejection of the Game Pass model illustrate an industry divided on the merits of Microsoft’s approach. That could make it difficult to bring more third-party developers on board.

Xbox Everywhere is the culmination of many different business strategies Microsoft has deployed over the years, many of them undeniably pro-consumer, like the cross-buy program Xbox Play Anywhere. But it’s always worth noting how the company might have gone in the direction of Nintendo or Sony had it not fallen so far behind the competition during the years of the Xbox One. Instead, the company put its faith in Spencer to architect a turnaround, and the results are finally bearing fruit.

—Nick Statt

Overheard

“The ever-present smile and impish squint of Mr. Miyamoto’s eyes were gone. ‘Neither of you understands the challenges of creating software that people love to play. This is something we constantly push ourselves to do. We do not give away our software,’ Mr. Miyamoto stated.” — Former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé recounted the internal debate to bundle Wii Sports with the original Wii console in an excerpt of his new book published in The Washington Post. Fils-Aimé won the argument, thankfully.