Do you feel that the overhaul you’ve made to Xbox One’s strategy has hurt its momentum?
No. And look, we remain true to our vision that we want to be wherever our consumers want us to be. We think that digital consumption patterns will change and grow over time. We think that the Cloud gives you a level of sophistication, depth and breadth that people can only dream of. And overtime more people will embrace that.
That said, we want to offer consumers choice, including physical discs and being able to do all the things that they want with those physical discs. We want to be available in any format that our consumers are looking for. We’ve always been very committed to consumer choice.
Why not stick with your strategy, and just try and educate consumers better on what it was you were trying to do?
As a business, the minute we don’t listen to our customers attentively, and adapt and react in an appropriate way, then we would be in a dangerous place. I love the fact that we are reactive and agile in that way. We remain true to our vision – digitally and physically – and we are genuinely in an enviable position versus anyone else in being able to deliver that. I wouldn’t trade places with anybody.
Those high profile Xbox One policy reversals? Nothing to lose sleep over, according to Xbox Europe vice-president Chris Lewis. Speaking to MCV in a new interview, Lewis insists that the next generation Xbox is performing well despite the abandoning of Microsoft's original digital strategy, which would have obliged users to sign in every 24 hours in order to ascertain game ownership.
"That said, we want to offer consumers choice, including physical discs and being able to do all the things that they want with those physical discs. We want to be available in any format that our consumers are looking for. We've always been very committed to consumer choice."
Some have attributed the "failure" of Microsoft's original digital plan to miscommunication rather than any inherent flaws, which is a credible-sounding line of thinking. Perhaps most notably, Xbox execs gave differing, partial accounts of how game trading would work on Xbox One back at reveal, cue a sizeable backlash.
"As a business, the minute we don't listen to our customers attentively, and adapt and react in an appropriate way, then we would be in a dangerous place," Lewis observed, when asked whether Microsoft could have stuck to its guns. "I love the fact that we are reactive and agile in that way. We remain true to our vision - digitally and physically - and we are genuinely in an enviable position versus anyone else in being able to deliver that. I wouldn't trade places with anybody.
