For the past 16 years, the Xbox brand has positioned itself as a key player in the industry, with 3 generation consoles – waiting for the powerful Xbox One X – and some historical titles, Microsoft’s game console division has gone from skepticism to reality soon.
Today there is no one who ignores what Xbox means in the world of video games and recently TIME magazine interviewed the head of the brand, Phil Spencer, who stressed the importance it has for Microsoft and the industry in general.
In an interview conducted by TIME with the Xbox boss Phil Spencer, one of the topics discussed was the significance that Xbox has today as a brand and what it represents for the company that saw the birth of the first console, Microsoft, and for the industry in general.
Firstly, Phil Spencer highlighted Microsoft’s vision for joining the video game industry directly and taking an unbeatable business opportunity: “I’ve been at Microsoft for 29 years, I’ve seen the growth in this company, and I know that Microsoft looks at opportunities that are scalable and important. Console is part of the opportunity in gaming that we see in Xbox. It is also not the whole opportunity. There’s a billion gamers on the planet, over $100 billion in the business. You have people playing on mobile, on PC, on console, virtual reality.”
Later, the Xbox boss referred to the importance of Xbox in the industry and the base that it has generated thanks to its online platform, Xbox LIVE, which has undertaken its expansion to cover other devices and even consoles: “When I think about our strengths in gaming, today the Xbox brand is iconic with console gaming. We are also Windows, as Microsoft, so we’ve placed a big focus on Windows gaming and that’s a large addressable market that we haven’t really played in that we’re expanding in. I see Xbox Live from a platform perspective as the most critical asset we have. Xbox Live is on iOS, it’s on Android, we talked about cross-play with Switch, and it’s obviously on PC and Xbox.”
Finally, Spencer talked about how important it is to Microsoft the segment of the console players: “When we think about the console space, it’s not the largest segment in gaming by far, but it is a critical customer segment that’s really important, and they love their games. And the best console gamers are the best gamers across every device, which not everybody sees, but we see it in the data. So if you’re a great console gamer, you’re probably playing a lot of PC games, you’re probably playing a lot of games on your mobile device, you’re just a gamer and you want to play on every device.”
