Whenever a company addresses a something like this, like insisting a thing that is rumoured to be happening isn’t happening, it is almost certainly happening.
To be fair, the rumor isn’t that Microsoft is getting rid of consoles. The rumor is that they’re making decisions that will, in a handful of years’ time, almost certainly result of getting rid of their consoles.
Haven’t there been some pretty flagrant cases where someone said “we are not doing XYZ” and then like 3 months later there was a big press announcement stating “guess what? We’re doing XYZ, and think you’re going to love it!!”?
“We’re listening and we hear you,” Phil Spencer wrote on X earlier this week. “We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”
If I understand corporate speech correctly, this means that XBox is essentially doomed. This is far more damning than anything that he is responding to could possibly have been saying.
Sadly, this doesn’t mean anything. Executives can’t and won’t share highly confidential future plan data with non-executive employees who don’t immediately require the knowledge, because if even one of them leaks that info, it can (and in this case, certainly would) tank their stock price.
Stopping production is not a plan that requires years of dev work to do, it’s something that they can announce at any time and put into practice almost immediately, so they can and will claim (even internally) that Xbox is not going away right up to the moment they publicly announce they’re killing it.
I love Phil, but he doesn’t have the influence within MS to single-handedly save Xbox if the larger company leadership decides to kill it.
Oh wow that means Xbox probably won’t be making consoles anymore
It’s really been whiplash inducing to go from reading about how Microsoft was going to dominate gaming because of the Activision buyout to reading about how Microsoft is going to be the next Sega and are possibly exiting the console market. And it all happened in the span of a few months.
Nothing like wasting my money buying digital Xbox since Xbox One days to have it turn into a subscription based company. I’ve enjoyed my Xbox, but really sucks. Still hopefully, but highly doubtful they will continue to make consoles. I’m guessing sub and cloud base allowing access on PS and Nintendo. Good for them, but no reason to keep on supporting Xbox. Move on over Sega, Atari, and whoever else, another one coming aboard
If Xbox disappears and leaves only PlayStation at that tier, I think it’s more likely we’re looking at the end of consoles altogether in as little as 15 years.
