Microsoft's weird "This is an Xbox" marketing appears to be getting quietly swept under the rug amid leadership changes

It would appear Microsoft could be retiring the phrase, "This is an Xbox." Amid a big transition of leadership, the campaign, pivoted on the notion of the brand being more of a platform than a singular line of consoles, appears to have been scrubbed from official channels.

As noticed by Game Developer, posts related to the slogan are no longer searchable whatsoever on the Xbox site. Searching for the tag and the post announcing the campaign itself give you a 404 error stating "Oops! That page cannot be found."

You can still find the reveal on Archive Today. According to the blog, this approach, "invites people to play with Xbox across multiple devices and screens. It showcases the evolution of Xbox as a platform that extends across devices, with bold, iconic, fun visuals and a light-hearted tone."

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Advertisements are still live on YouTube. The first video, demonstrating people playing Xbox games on multiple kinds of hardware, is watchable, as is another ad from October 2025. Multiple Instagram posts on the official Xbox account based around the slogan remain up as well.

Though perhaps innocuous on their own, these changes are made conspicuous by how closely they follow the exits of Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, the former CEO of Microsoft Gaming and president of Xbox, respectively. Asha Sharma, former president of CoreAI at Microsoft, replaces Spencer.

A report from The Verge states that Bond championed the 'This is an Xbox' campaign, as part of the 'Xbox everywhere' initiative, even if it reportedly wasn't received well at all by many Xbox employees. It's not a venture that's proven altogether lucrative for the brand, with unclear messaging not helped by mixed levels of follow-through, such as the Xbox mobile store that still doesn't exist after being announced, by Bond personally, in summer 2024.

Change is underway at Microsoft's big green box, and what comes of it remains to be seen. We'll keep you posted on what is, and isn't, an Xbox.

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