"An Xbox that's only good for launching Steam is like subsidizing Valve's cash," says Microsoft vet

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."

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