Look, right, it's my best gaming side post ever. I'm posting it here because nobody in the thread will read it.
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To me, Microsoft's problem is completely in their messaging. They speak to me as if I'm sat in a boardroom with their marketing team; so much of their language is couched in the kind of phrases I hear all day at work (I'm a lawyer) - bloated, distended sentences full of unnecessary words and hip, new neologisms to replace content.
They've woefully misjudged just how literate the 'core' gaming consumer is. It's frustrating - and I say this as a Sony fangirl - to see a company stumble so blatantly and so frequently over and over again in delivering what could be a competent product.
That's my moan.
As for solutions, Microsoft really need to work on promoting diversity in their games. I don't mean "more women in gaming"; I mean the types of experience. To my mind the Xbox is the place where 13-year old American boys play Call of Duty every night and call everybody "fag", while Sony is offering a diverse set of experiences for adults - Flower, The Last of Us, Journey, The Witness, No Man's Sky and so on. I'm aware that the Xbox does have a growing cadre of impressive and interesting smaller-budget games but the messaging is drowned out between the bad press and the lucrative Call of Duty tie-ins. I would therefore suggest that they work harder on this; drop the business-speak. We are not shareholders and we are just about the most informed consumers on the market. Be honest and direct and just show the games. Do some bloody outreach; not with your slick marketing directors who shine at investors' meetings but flounder when speaking to consumers but with developers, community managers; people who are passionate about the content and actually have real, relatable experience of it.
I'd like there to be more competition but I do wonder whether it's gone a bit too far now. Microsoft seems to be a company without a real purpose at the moment, perhaps even where Sony was before it began divesting large chunks of the company and scaling down. I think the answer would be to scale back the noise around the Xbox and for them to demonstrate some faith in the product themselves. As it is, they almost seem ashamed of it.
