Jon Kimmich's 16 years at Microsoft included the conceptual years for the Xbox brand, so he speaks with some experience when he says Xbox can't be two things at once.
In a lengthy analysis on GamesBeat, Kimmich distinguishes between Microsoft Gaming as a business and Xbox as a platform. Loosely echoing former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden, he frames a choice for Microsoft: does it want to invest in a platform and give people reasons to buy Xbox consoles, or does it want to maximize its efficiency as a publisher? Recently, its actions skew toward the latter.
"The Xbox platform is the relationship with players and developers: the console, Xbox Mode, commerce, identity, ownership, community, tools, and third-party support," he clarifies, adding, "Microsoft Gaming may grow while the Xbox platform withers."
The console as the centerpiece of Xbox – something new CEO Asha Sharma has committed to – is a sticking point. Revisiting a notorious Xbox slogan that's since died out, Kimmich says, "'This is an Xbox' was a campaign worth aiming for," but it got lost, like so much at Microsoft, in "timing and execution." It didn't serve "the promise you're making" or "the experience" itself, so the multiplatform campaign "became the punchline to a joke Microsoft told on itself."
Much of this, Kimmich reasons, stems from the fence-sitting approach that Xbox took for many years. The "play anywhere" promise almost unavoidably grew the audience – more places means more people – but wasn't "a compelling reason to choose Xbox," Kimmich says of the Phil Spencer era, resulting in a platform that "became everything, and nothing; to everyone and nobody."
Xbox further expanded into PC and the cloud, but didn't master any one platform, let alone build and clearly define its own. Kimmich contrasts this "incoherent' approach with Valve's work on Steam: "Meanwhile, Steam had one focus: the PC customer. Xbox never answered the two questions that mattered: which layers must we own, and which internal business would take priority (and when)?"
Here, Microsoft's next console, Xbox Project Helix, is a key, and perhaps final, test. Without the "anchor" of a console as a "signature product," the whole platform becomes a simple "suite of services customers can purchase piecemeal from elsewhere."
"I was there at the beginning of Xbox," he recalls. "Inside Microsoft, the fear wasn't merely that Sony would sell more consoles; it was that another company would gain ownership of the operating and commerce layer in the living room. First-party games were how Xbox earned the right to exist. They were not the goal of the exercise."
With Project Helix, like the PS6, fighting to exist at all in a dire hardware market hollowed out by AI demand, an indecisive platform offering could be a death sentence, especially if Microsoft's new console is as PC-focused as it seems. There's a risk Project Helix ends up epitomizing and dooming Xbox as a platform entirely: a console that is completely overshadowed by third parties on its own turf, the antithesis of the Nintendo Switch 2.
We know Helix will run PC games, but how does it compete as a console, as a thing players are expected to buy and connect to a TV in the living room? "An Xbox that’s only good for launching Steam is like subsidizing Valve's cash register," Kimmich reasons.
"If I got to write the doctrine, I'd pick platform" over pure publishing, he says. The benefits to having a platform are enormous, even if building one is hard – setting terms, owning the sales pipeline, attracting developers, building consumer loyalty, gaining leverage over other platforms, and more productively applying Microsoft's enormous Azure and PlayFab footprint.
"Stabilize the console, make it the reference device, but don’t confuse the two," Kimmich explains. "Turn Xbox Mode into a coherent XboxOS on Windows machines and third-party devices. Make ownership and developer reach the reason people pick your brand. The Store, first-party games, Game Pass, the cloud, mobile – all to support that promise. And yes, give your fans a bit of hope."
"Microsoft has to own a scarce layer that players, developers, and hardware makers all willingly value. If the PC Store never competes, if Play Anywhere remains a niche offering, and if XboxOS offers nothing that Steam and regular old Windows doesn’t already, then the platform case is dead."
Tragically, this will require releasing some good games, which has been one of Xbox's biggest struggles for years, as well as successful realignment of a sprawling, flailing business.
Kinnich lays out expectations for the next 12 to 24 months: "Microsoft should be able to point to third-party XboxOS devices; rising Play Anywhere and PC Store usage; Disc to Digital migrating into Helix; genuine progress in Minecraft’s creator economy; faster publishing for developers; a decision about the relationship between Battle.net and the Xbox Store; and an exclusivity policy that survives more than one reporting period."
The clearest sign that Xbox has failed in its bid to build a platform, he adds, would be a "premium-priced" Helix with no clear selling point, an Xbox launcher "mainly" serving other stores like Steam, "getting casket-ready on crown-jewel assets," and seeing money fed back into Microsoft instead of into Xbox itself. (As it happens, Halo, the face of Xbox, was just shuffled into Activision, with Halo Studios dismantled following the PC, Xbox, and PS5 release of Halo: Campaign Evolved.)
As Xbox lays off thousands while consolidating, closing, or spinning out studios, Kimmich reckons "the worst outcome is to promise a platform and run a harvest portfolio."
