Xbox Branding Strategy: The Definitive Review

Longing for the Allard days

It’s awful to think that in just over a year, Arkane Austin has gone through a public humiliation over Redfall and, a few days ago, a brutal assassination at the hands of its corporate overlords. Its summer seemingly spent, the absolute worst that I feared has actually happened. Having mentioned it in this piece’s Deathloop section, the sense of apocalyptic celebration in Blackreef feels far more palpable now that we know what a muddled, presumably-ordered-by-corporate mess Redfall turned out to be. Perhaps internally as Deathloop matured, all this was well-known and the future closure of Austin perhaps sensed as inevitable as compromise upon compromise struggled to make Redfall a viable product. This seems especially significant given Lyon’s leap to licensed IP for its next project. But at least the obituary editorials and “Prey was a masterpiece and you should feel absolutely ashamed for not buying it twice” pieces have arrived in the formal games media, proving once again that in this modern age, we only seem to truly appreciate greatness once it’s undergone some tragedy that prevents it from properly capitalised upon. For a solid take, please do read Nathan Brown’s excoriation here: https://newsletter.hitpoints.co/261-dishonoured/ . As someone who’s written thousands of words about the ‘consolidation contraction’ of the current high-end videogames industry, Nathan’s bitterness is entirely valid, and seethes with the righteous indignation at a managerial class that has systematically failed to protect its true assets in favour of some credo of brutal, economic fundamentalism. The plain truth being these assholes fucked it all up, for all of us. And, in Microsoft’s case, it really does seem like a decade of absolutely laughable brand and business mismanagement has been patched over with a series of extraordinarily expensive acquisitions, all to mask profound failures in strategy.  In a way, for Arkane Austin I can see a kind of romantic fatalism at play, something that allows the studio that made Prey join a choir of ascended angels alongside Origin Systems, Looking Glass, Ion Storm, Irrational et al. Given the savagery of Microsoft’s creative self-harm, we can almost certainly bet Obsidian no longer feels a secure warmth under Microsoft’s wings, much like Ninja Theory and Doublefine. Can Arkane Lyon survive Blade? Who knows. But at least I know where the real celebration of the true Arkane spirit lay. The afterparty is Deathloop, with all that came before it being the fine cuisine we should all savour with an extra sense of gratitude - namely that it ever happened at all.

Redfall, like Starfield and Hi-Fi Rush were obviously intended to be drivers for explosive Game Pass growth. Even though for the majority the first two were crushing disappointments, even Hi-Fi Rush’s critical and community success couldn’t save a studio that had done absolutely nothing wrong. Well, aside being bought by a company that appears to be completely lost strategically. Microsoft’s seemingly catastrophic hardware sales in the face of the old Sony dependable highlights how important strong branding really is. The Xbox ‘family’ is a fucking nightmare to explain to newbies - that’s how terrible its naming conventions are. When they went from Xbox to Xbox 360, it worked. But to progress from Xbox 360 to Xbox One, when there was already an Xbox 1, seems remarkably stupid. To then name the upgraded Xbox One as the Xbox One S might be OK, if not very exciting, but then naming its new generation the Xbox Series X, with a budget version as the Xbox Series S is incredibly confusing. It still is to me! Really the biggest flaw here is going with ‘Xbox’ in the first place, as it’s a remarkably ugly name to say¹. All those ‘x’ phonemes just collide in an unholy mess, like a mouthful of lego spiders, and is so far removed from the smooth alliterative symmetry of play-stay-shun. Nin-ten-do follows that same pleasing rhythm as the original source. Ex-box-seer-rees-ex is just hideous. And, of course, ‘Series X’ removes the brand identity in a way ‘PS5’ does not. Albeit abbreviated, the ‘PlayStation’ is still there. Nintendo’s genius in choosing a completely generic word for the Switch means it’s forever preceded by the full brand name. “Have you got the Switch?”, “What switch?”, “The Nintendo Switch”. I suppose with Xbox 360, there was much delight in introducing yet another ‘x’, though ‘three-six-tee’ complies with the smoothness of symmetry mentioned earlier. But Mattrick was too arrogant with that godawful TV integration push and went with a name that subtly betrays the hubris. Perhaps they thought Xbox One would reduce down to ‘the One’, which has a particularly coke-tinged egotism to it. I can get the branding concept around ideas of unity, bringing together subscription TV and (potentially) discless gaming into a singular box, though of course it completely failed to predict the very predictable eventuality of the displays themselves hosting the TV services with far less friction than the power-on and login cycles of a separate home console, no matter how smooth Kinect’s voice recognition proved to be. Having suffered a horrific pasting for an entire generation, squandering the previous two generations of goodwill and loyalty on things that we never asked for, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that Microsoft allowed Xbox to split the SKUs and offer two products without correctly separating the brand identities. I think we can agree that whenever this has been tried in the past, it’s been a sure-fire recipe for success.

For my money, Xbox could have done a lot better by accepting second place in the big boy battle with Sony and slotting into a new niche with the Series S concept. The machine itself is a lightweight, inobtrusive delight, being surprisingly portable. I have no idea what the Series X is like as I have absolutely no need whatsoever to have one. This makes the Series X redundant for all but those who love discs and love high resolutions, right? The Series S is more than good enough and because it's the natural (and arguably correct) home for Game Pass, it offers all the premium games that the Series X was built to show off. When you see stats such as the 2022 claim that 75% of Xboxes sold were Series S, there’s a message from the consumers right there. They were happy with the cheap option. We can point to pandemic-affected availability levels, but the price for the unit was so aggressive that I’d argue the Series S would still represent the majority of the installed base if the Series X had been widely available. I think if it had offered the full Game Pass for 12 months as default, three or four games pre-installed² and twice the storage, Xbox would now have a very nice and reliable niche (though its sustainability long-term remains questionable). Kick back and let Sony struggle on with all the fancy and expensive bespoke architecture shit, then take eco-pops at them for being dinosaurs with their big disc duplication plants and all that carbon pumping out from shipping said discs to shops and fulfilment centres.

There is something so very Microsoft about the whole Xbox story. To be more specific, it’s Microsoft in the Ballmerian mode. Brash, blinkered, driven to grow via acquisition instead of innovation, pompous, hubristic. It’s interesting to note that in every hardware arena aside gaming, Microsoft spent huge amounts of money and leveraged OS market shares, to end up with poor commercial performances that lead to failure and/or withdrawal. Its Surface laptop-tablet project saw a fairly catastrophic drop in revenue (measurable in the billions) last year and we all remember the fates of Zune and Windows Mobile. I’m reminded of an apocryphal anecdote I was told in my PR days by someone who’d been in the room with Ballmer for some edition of Encarta. As far as I remember, Ballmer had taken control of the CD-ROM encyclopaedia because he’d ordered some chunky portion of the budget, some millions of dollars, to be spent on licensing IP and footage of basketball, because he fucking loved basketball. He wanted loads of footage on the disc, pushing out all the zebras and cathedral videos, featuring basketball to the extent of stopping it being a functional encyclopaedia. It took a lot of shouting - a lot of shouting - to  convince him to avoid fucking up the Encarta brand. This probably explains why Microsoft released a CD-ROM dedicated to the NBA but not the NFL, Baseball or Indycar. There is obviously something fundamentally broken in that approach, which probably explains why there’s something fundamentally broken at Xbox. And alas, it seems it’s the turn of the game development industry to pay the price for Xbox corporate failures. People may remember Ken Kutaragi being ejected from explicit control of PlayStation hardware when the PS3 was struggling, seeing as (according to legend) Ken had maniacally demanded the system’s particularly quixotic and expensive architecture. I was told by a surprisingly senior executive³ that Sony was having to recoup a colossal R&D cost on the Cell project via PlayStation 3. Another SCEE member intimated that Ken had to be restrained because he wanted to put three HDMI ports on every PS3 and had actually lost his mind. Yet with Ken neutered, Sony immediately switched to a PC hardware model and reclaimed the throne in juggernaut fashion. Sure, that’s the competence that comes from 50 years+ of consumer electronics manufacture, but despite internal politics and unwise hardware investments, Sony’s public-facing PlayStation brand never skipped a beat for the wider consumer base (PSN hack notwithstanding). Instead, it consolidated via singleplayer exclusives throughout the PlayStation 4 cycle and built a seemingly undefeatable reputation. For Xbox, despite the absolutely bounteous embarrassment of riches Game Pass offers, its big brand-defining moments have all fizzled or collapsed. Forza Horizon 5 being too much of a map-swap of 4, Redfall’s forced conceptual failure, Halo Infinite’s utter incapacity to capture community imagination⁴, Starfield’s retrogressive conservatism, Forza Motorsport’s initial rejection by the racing sim fanbase. All of these are fundamental errors that are simply unthinkable under the Sony or Nintendo banners, yet seem to be quarterly occurrences for Xbox. And yes, the cost is absolutely in poisoning its own well in both content and community goodwill. I was just laughing at the news that Phil Spencer’s base in Fallout 76 is now being bombarded with nukes on a regular basis. An irony there being the phoenix-like rebirth of Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 in line with the TV show’s popularity, and how it seems a fair proportion of the newly-available dev staff from those studio closures may end up in the Fallout 76 content pipeline. Naturally, when Bethesda launched a super-duper graphical upgrade to bring Fallout 4 up to par on modern hardware, it was a fucking mess on the Xboxes.

For a final word, I don’t think anyone summed it up better than Arkane Lyon’s Dinga Bakaba. His “fucking gut stab” missive gave the headlines plenty of visceral reaction drama, but I think it’s the body of this tweet where the real wisdom lies: “Don't throw us into gold fever gambits, don't use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don't make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.” Speaking as a studio head whose position may be just as perilous as Harvey Smith’s, there’s an admirable level of bravery in being this direct in public. Given the caprice of a division that praised Tango Gameworks to the point of promising investment, only to close it within 12 months, perhaps Dinga feels there really is nothing to lose in speaking out when one half of his beloved, wonderful company is callously excised from the corporate balance sheet. I admire that voice, just as much as I admired the voices that gave us Prey. And yet, even if Xbox managed to turn everything around and magically filled Game Pass with brilliant exclusives, I doubt it could overwrite the damage already done, over so many years. I mentioned in a comment on Nathan’s piece how I long for the Allard years. Those days when the Xbox 360 was the future arriving, when HD and online gaming were maturing on this pale white console with its bright green lights. When Live Arcade filled with bite-size joys at cheap prices, when the precedents of the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox promises carried on the march of progress to bigger, better, more sophisticated games. That white and green Xbox 360 branding seemed so new and clean, so hopeful, so open and naturalistic in some ways. Now, it just all feels Series X dark grey, just like thunderous skies, as if the entire Xbox project is anticipating its own giant, unavoidable red ring of death. And all along, there sat the lowly Series S, the white-with-black appliance, a rare object of commercial parsimony. That Series X tower may have tried to flex its superiority up against the bonkers swan-vase of the PlayStation 5, but it was never going to win with a sub-Apple visual style in dark grey tones. The Series S though; that actually did get a tribute toaster and in so many ways, that lack of pomposity, absence of fallacious grandeur, that simple humility offers so much more accidental, organic charm than Microsoft could ever hope to engineer into its public image, Xbox or otherwise. And yet the Series S hangs in a Damoclean prison born of its maker’s hubris. Just as with Arkane Austin, Tango and the others yet to fall, it seems unseen Game Pass metrics and inscrutable thresholds will determine the fate of everything Xbox.   

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1. What is perhaps odder is the alignment with the X-Files, perhaps the entry point for X-prefixed things and likely very present when the Xbox was being formulated. Certainly the original black-with-green branding matches X-Files promo logos, where the ‘X’ was often the same uranium-glow green.

2. For me, this alone highlights how bad the strategic thinking was. Sell an online-only console, but treat it like a disc-based one by having fuck all on it. How difficult would it have been to include a Halo or Geometry Wars on there? How about a suite of platform holder crown jewels from the Xbox, Xbox, 360 and Xbox One, ready to go, no online required?

3. I can’t say who it was at SCEE, but somehow we accidentally met at BAFTA and got on really well. That was only the SECOND opportunity to foster a career at Sony that I completely missed at the time.

4. In certain communities, the dreadful mishandling of Halo is considered one the great tragedies of the Xbox story. It never really reached the same heights of surprise and delight that the original displayed, and the absolutely lukewarm indifference shown to Halo Infinite could not be any more explicit an example of how a halo brand (lol) can be mismanaged into decline and irrelevance. See also: losing Epic but keeping the Gears of War IP and missing exclusivity (even if temporary) for Fortnite.