On Monday, Entertainment Weekly ran a piece titled “Out of the (X)box: At 25, the gaming giant seeks to level up with new ways of play and Hollywood adaptations,” based around post-Summer Game Fest interviews with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty, as well as people involved in Xbox's movie and TV adaptations and some of its biggest games. EW’s audience isn’t a gaming audience, but even knowing you can’t hold an Xbox story in its pages to those expectations, the whole thing is a masterclass in an outlet getting played.
There are all kinds of reasons why stories end up the way they do, and all manner of hands and priorities that shape what appears on the page. Within this story are a few stories that I could even imagine reading differently on their own: Focusing on Xbox’s adaptations makes sense for a general entertainment readership. A story about Sharma, previously in the background of corporate jobs, navigating a distinctly public role in front of a vocal and passionate fanbase could make a useful read for the industry professional segment of EW’s audience, who might find themselves in a similar position.
But when all this is mashed together, what you get instead is a forcefully positive profile of a company reinventing itself, with such a glossing mention of looming layoffs that it almost reads more like a puff piece than if they weren’t mentioned at all. In the story’s respectable effort to not shy away from the layoffs, but also without any willingness to actually go into how Xbox ended up here and its consequences–either to not alienate readers who don’t care about gaming, or to not offend its subjects–, the story leaves out a mind-bending amount of context and its real human costs. “Sharma's vision is to turn Xbox into not just the biggest gaming company, but the biggest entertainment company,” it reads, without any inches given to how the company achieved its current size (plenty of Activision Blizzard studios are mentioned, for instance, with no mention of how they became Xbox studios) and how much of the position Xbox currently finds itself in, both financially and with fans, is a consequence of that quest for growth.
Here’s how the layoffs get explained:
But that path has proved a bit leaky.
Just a couple weeks out from the Showcase (and their interviews with EW), leaks began in the press about potential layoffs at Xbox. Sharma and Booty then jointly announced a "reset" in a memo to staff that they, in the spirit of transparency, made public directly on the brand's website. Among various points were mentions of a decline in annual revenue, the "hardware component crisis" (the still-rising inflation of console storage component costs), and how they "overextended" as they executed on changing strategies.
Amid various reports and online rumblings of entire studio closures, Xbox has not officially commented on the matter. Sources tell EW that restructuring plans are still being finalized. Leadership aims to exhaust all other options before making these decisions, and Xbox will update teams once details are solidified.
When Sharma speaks with EW prior to the "reset" announcement, she's direct and matter-of-fact about the issues ahead.
"Technology companies are going through this, entertainment companies are going through this, and certainly gaming is not immune to it,” she says. “When COVID hit, all the demand came forward at the same time that AI happened. The whole industry is in a time of change…. In a couple of weeks, I'll share some numbers with our team and we can share some numbers with you, too, on the state of Xbox and the work ahead for us — and how we're going to make sure that we are a stronger business on the other side."
A non-gaming outlet doesn’t need to care about layoffs in the gaming space, strictly speaking, and this story is largely about Xbox’s entertainment ambitions rather than the game workers it employs. But I wouldn’t expect a journalist to call them “leaks” rather than what they are: reports, or works of journalism. There’s no need to highlight Xbox’s “spirit of transparency” when surely the company published the memo to get ahead of the PR crisis of its plans becoming public. And I don’t know that I would call Sharma’s quoted response “direct and matter-of-fact”--she says the same general shit every gaming executive says about covid and AI and industry headwinds, though a non-gaming audience might not yet be exhausted by these same old explanations.
The piece then briskly moves on to growth, highlighting Fallout and the Minecraft movies, marveling at Kojima, and sneaking in chances to “exclusively reveal” a plot summary for the Gears of War movie and “also report that Sea of Thieves will be developed into a live-action movie.” Twice it makes mention of the Xbox “family,” one of the worst bits of corporate-ese that a journalist simply doesn’t need to take part in. It calls studio King “another jewel under the Xbox umbrella,” which is both cringy and a mixed metaphor.
And, after describing Sharma as “the Wisconsin-raised black belt in taekwondo” and highlighting “the green trim of her white Adidas sneaks” during Xbox’s SGF showcase, it ends on a classic Girl Boss Can Have It All kicker:
As she charts the road ahead, Sharma knows it will be difficult and sacrifices will have to be made, but it's all serving the larger mission to make Xbox bigger than ever. How does a self-described introvert shrug off the weight of that responsibility at the end of the day?
"I go for a walk. I did a walk right in between Showcase and this [interview]," she says. "I FaceTime my kids and I just try to get back in touch with the most core part of who I am."
Juggling her private and public personas has been an adjustment for the newly christened CEO: "I've never really been out there. I've always been the number two. The only three-letter word I aspired to was 'mom,' so it's been a really big change."
Xbox’s aims for its participation in this story are abundantly clear. As I wrote previously, the company and its execs can’t sit around being sad about their own decisions. They need to portray themselves as making tough choices to put the company in a better position, aggressively on the up and with a clear plan for the future. This story does that, with the added bonus of not having to speak to a gaming audience who might be motivated to hold their feet to the fire or who might have the context to poke holes in the story they’re laundering through EW. If you’re Xbox, this is a great story at a great time in a great outlet, talking to the new audiences you hope to attract to your movies and TV shows and to the entertainment industry power players you want to get on board.
But as gaming outlets close or get converted to SEO and AI slop, and as major media companies pull back from gaming coverage, stories like this read as painfully tone-deaf to anyone who understands gaming as something that existed before its early covid boom, or who cares about the industry enough to know why it needs rigorous reporting. It is simply telling the story a company wants to tell, at a time when that story is of particular use to that company. That's a job for PR, not a journalist and their outlet. The real story is messy and complicated, and it also involves people--Booty and Sharma, sure, but also the game creatives it speaks to who surely find themselves in the complicated position of hyping their games while worrying about their fates. By going wide without going deep, and by prioritizing the company above the real people involved, the piece not only doesn't tell the whole story, but lets down both the people the writer spoke to and EW's readers.
Most of that readership probably isn’t reading this as they wait for Xbox’s next shoe to thunderously drop. But if a journalist’s job is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” as the saying goes, this story betrays those values, doing sunny PR work for a company that’s raring up to inflict unpredictable damage on the “game creators as artists” whom Booty praises in his interview. Xbox is more than capable of doing this kind of thing for itself; a journalist and their outlet don’t need to lend it a hand.
