Xbox has changed its name and backtracked on Game Pass prices, but is it too little too late?

My favorite console is starting to feel like home again. Two months since Asha Sharma took over as CEO, Microsoft Gaming as we knew it under Phil Spencer is no more. Xbox is back, as the new branding seen in a recent blogpost tells us, and with it comes promising rumblings.

Last year's extreme Game Pass Ultimate price hike has been rolled back, bringing the monthly charge down from $29.99US to a more reasonable $22.99 at the cost of day-one Call of Duty games. It's a sigh of relief for anyone like me who had no choice but to drop a tier or two after the news first dropped, especially since I don't really care about Call of Duty. But as Sharma does her best to revolutionize Xbox, unpicking some of the Spencer era's less-than-popular moves, is it already too late to turn this ship around?

Apology tour

I hope not. Microsoft Gaming's mercurial nature made it impossible to predict, from pushing Cloud and multi-platform services over flagship console growth to sweeping layoffs, high-profile acquisitions , and more. Sharma doing something as direct as changing a name and dropping a subscription service fee is all the more meaningful as a result.

For starters, it reclaims the identity and roots of Xbox itself. The reneged "everything is an Xbox" campaign is proof of how far the company strayed from its roots, trading the ethos of progress, innovation, and quality that had been attached to Xbox since the halcyon 360 era for kitschy ads claiming that anything from a fridge to your mobile phone could be an Xbox. De-centering the Series X and S consoles at a base level was questionable, even if I give Spencer props for actively bowing out of the console wars I so very detested writing about (infighting is lame, kids).

Microsoft Gaming was positioning itself as publisher for the modern era of gaming, attempting to unite instead of divide. But all it really did was de-value the console itself, distancing the company from its product and ultimately snubbing it. If anything can be an Xbox, after all, why should I pay $500 dollars for one?

Because it's a sick console, that's why! Give me smooth, cuboid surfaces over the PS5's awkward sculptural weirdness any day, a subscription service that actually has games I want to play, and a controller with joystick placement that doesn't give me tendonitis in my thumbs like two weeks of holding a DualSense has.

Still, I've felt embarrassed about being a predominantly Xbox player. A cross-platform push means that most first-party titles end up on PS5 within a year if not day-one, and as a result, most of my friends who own both consoles would rather wait it out. With the ever-changing, near annual pricing changes of Xbox Game Pass, it's been hard to argue against that mindset. I even docked myself right down to the Essential tier as a tiny personal act of defiance. As Xbox notes in the aforementioned blog post, though, this feeling of estrangement has become widespread. "'Microsoft Gaming' describes our structure but it does not describe our ambition," Sharma and Xbox CCO Matt Booty write in the blog post. "So, we are going back to where we started and changing our team’s name."

It's so satisfying to see Xbox return to its pre-2022 roots, before the push to acquire Activision-Blizzard incentivized the name change in the first place. By re-aligning the Microsoft Gaming team with the console itself, and making its unique host of games more accessible, it feels like Sharma is letting us in from the cold – and I, for one, am embracing the changes with (cautious) optimism. It can't get much worse than remortgaging your house to play Fable Anniversary – right?

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