Inside the return of Xbox

Two weeks ago there was a buzz in the air inside Microsoft’s studio D building. Hundreds of Xbox employees gathered early on a Thursday morning, packed into the hallways and atrium, to hear from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma . The “return of Xbox” slogan was plastered all over the walls of the building, the same message Sharma first delivered to Xbox employees in February. It was time for Sharma to rally the troops, after two years of turbulence, and hint at the future of Xbox. During the roughly 40-minute all-hands, sources tell me that Sharma laid out a four-point action plan for Xbox employees, focusing on several areas in turn: hardware, games, platform, and services. “We have to be honest about where we are. We’ve got work to do,” admitted Sharma. “Players are frustrated with us, they feel like we haven’t updated our console enough, they feel like our PC presence isn’t very strong.” The answer to those frustrations is what many Xbox employees and fans had been hoping for, a renewed focus on fixing things for the existing audience of Xbox. “We’re going to start by restoring our core. We have to fix the fundamentals on console and PC. We have to sweat every single detail and every single part of the experience to get to fun much faster and make it simpler,” Sharma told Xbox employees. Microsoft used to ship interesting new Xbox features every month, but over the past year the company hasn’t done enough of that. …