After struggling to compete with the PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, Microsoft's gaming division has spent the last few years trying to remake the Xbox brand into a software label first and foremost: it started with Steam releases and cloud streaming, continued with the painful "This is an Xbox" ad campaign, and culminated in phrases like "We're able to honor the Halo legacy on PlayStation" which could only be read as admissions of defeat. Now with the abrupt retirement of longtime boss Phil Spencer, incoming Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma has said that the company "will celebrate our roots with a renewed commitment to Xbox starting with console."
What, exactly, does that mean for the last few years of Microsoft's gaming strategy?
