An article about some of her answers from the recent Bloomberg interview. These aren't related to mobile or the studio closures, so figured it would benefit from its own thread. If not, please close or merge, thanks!
Some of the questions and answers, thread has some more and mentions that she talked about AI as well.
I did find it interesting that she doubled down on all Xbox first party releasing on game pass, even activision.
Some interesting tidbits for sure, even though a lot of it is just word salad. I didn't think cloud was still growing much, maybe it's just PR speak?
Sarah Bond Talks About The Future of Xbox
Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, talks about the future of Xbox such as hardware, game pass, cloud, and AI utilization
xboxera.com
Some of the questions and answers, thread has some more and mentions that she talked about AI as well.
Dina: "Another big discussion point in the ABK acquisition was cloud gaming, and how big that market really was. When will we really see it gain traction. How is it doing?"
Sarah: "…We're seeing tremendous growth there. We have more demand than supply in that area, and you'll see us rollingout more capacity, introducing more options for people to jump in and play on the cloud."
Dina: "And is it growing faster than the overall market?"
Sarah: "It is, it is growing faster than the overall market, really bringing in new players and growth for us. So it's an area where we're investing more and are excited about.
Dina: "Xbox itself's heritage is in console. The energy around the console right now is a little challenged, many of the hardcore long-term consumers are worried, worried about the release on other platforms, worried that it may indicate that Xbox is defocusing on its own hardware. What do you say to them? How do you make them feel that Xbox is still for them?"
Sarah: "Yeah, at first the worry that I see is happening across the industry and I think that a lot of what we see is just industry all up. But specific to core gamers, my focus has really been on engineering and building that next-generation hardware experience that really, really, taps into their needs. I talked about this a little bit publically a few months ago, that our focus was on delivering the biggest leap ever. And that's about really thinking through every aspect of what that hardware and what that experience delivers with the core gamer in mind. And that is about power and performance, absolutely a part of it.
"But it's also about the ability to be able to play all of the games. I mean we have people who have been playing on Xbox for decades and have invested thousands and thousands of dollars and hours with us and being able to take all of those games with them into the hardware of the future. So one of the decisions made when I came in and became president of Xbox was to establish at team dedicated to that to game preservation and ensuring that future generations, future iterations, that you get to take those things with you forward.
I did find it interesting that she doubled down on all Xbox first party releasing on game pass, even activision.
"And the last piece is about game pass. We know our core users love game pass, game pass is a gaming subscription, you get a whole portfolio of games, but importantly you get every single one of the games we build day one in game pass. and the quality and the breadth of those games has only been going up over time. And you're going to see some more really big games going into Game Pass later this year."
Dina: "From Activision's portfolio or?"
Sarah: "Across the whole slate, across the whole slate, you're going to see some really amazing things. And keeping that as something that is really special for Xbox players is central to us."
Some interesting tidbits for sure, even though a lot of it is just word salad. I didn't think cloud was still growing much, maybe it's just PR speak?