Remember how HBO kept changing its name under Warner Brothers, eventually realizing that the thing people associated it with and wanted to pay for was HBO? Well, it looks like Xbox has done the same thing, reportedly deciding that no, actually, it’s Xbox.
According to The Verge’s Tom Warren, new Xbox head Asha Sharma announced internally that Xbox is calling itself Xbox again, doing away with the “Microsoft Gaming” moniker it’s been using since 2022 and the Activision Blizzard acquisition. This is part of the “return of Xbox” Sharma touted in her first announcement, which has also seen her lower the price of Game Pass and remove day one Call of Duty access from the service.
Previously, new Xbox leadership also threw former Xbox president Sarah Bond under the bus for the company’s misguided “This Is An Xbox” campaign, which has now been thoroughly scrubbed from the internet. An effort to sell Xboxes by talking about all the things that aren’t Xboxes was always a baffling idea and I’m glad the company killed it, but painting the whole thing as some kind of pivot is equally baffling when it felt like Xbox’s efforts to not be Xbox never gained much traction, shockingly, among people who care about Xboxes.
According to Warren, in what is always a sign of a healthy and normal company,
Microsoft has now plastered the “return of Xbox” slogan on the walls of its Xbox offices this week, along with “great games” and “future of play.” … A new Xbox logo has also started appearing on Microsoft’s campus this week, ahead of the Xbox showcase in June.
I have to be honest with you: I, a person who writes about video games professionally and so often writes about Xbox, had largely forgotten about “Microsoft Gaming” and have infrequently used it instead of just writing “Xbox,” the word for "Xbox" I assume most of our readers associate with Xbox. That Microsoft spent four years coming to the same conclusion is real business brain hours, definitely the kind of thing I’d expect from a company that’s wasted time and money confusing people about which company it is.
Autumn Wright
