Read Jon Kimmich’s piece today on GamesBeat

Jon Kimmich 🔜 DICE Europe (Athens) and I have been friends since 2001. He negotiated the deal that brought Bungie to Microsoft, and I was the first marketer on Halo. This morning Jon published "Quo Vadis, Xbox?" on GamesBeat, and it is the most complete answer I have read to the question of where Xbox can go next.

Jon’s article lays out what Microsoft has to own, what it should subsidize, what it should charge for, and who needs the authority to decide. The level of detail is a gift to anyone trying to understand the choices in front of the company, and you should read the whole thing, …now.

I agree with nearly all of it, and I want to pick up one sentence he states and moves past. “People must believe the promise you are making, and the experience must deliver.”

Positioning is the space a brand occupies in a player's head. It’s the promise. "This is an Xbox" clouded the Xbox promise to consumers. The campaign told players that a phone, a laptop, a TV and a handheld were all Xboxes, and the question it left behind was the one Jon asks in a different form, “if everything is an Xbox, why do I need one.”

Where a game can run is a distribution fact, not a brand promise.

Xbox can stand for a console, and that is a defensible position if Microsoft holds it. It could even stand for the cross-device ownership promise Jon writes out at the end of his piece. But it also needs to stand for more than that.

Jon's plan is practical direction, and all of it is necessary. The games business also runs on passion, fandom, community, and brands people want to believe in. Every decision in his plan depends on someone inside Xbox understanding, at a personal level, what these worlds and characters mean to the people who play them.

The original Xbox found its meaning through a game (Halo) and a small group of people close enough to players to know what mattered.

Ask an Xbox owner today what the brand stands for and you get a lot of confused looks or a list of places a game can run. I say the games will decide most of it. Positioning decides the rest, and that is a choice Microsoft has not made since Phil Spencer said in 2015 that Xbox needed a vision players could buy into.

So I will leave the question open. What should an Xbox stand for, and what would make you proud to say you own one, or that your game runs on one?