Sarah Bond, who was promoted to the role of Xbox president nearly two years ago, has been featured in a video interview with Fortune Magazine. After a brief introduction about her earlier career outside the games industry (she worked at McKinsey & Company and later at T-Mobile), the conversation switched to her passion for gaming and her work at Microsoft.
The interviewer asked where hardware fits within Xbox's new multiplatform, everything-is-an-Xbox strategy, and Bond said everything starts with the console, adding that the next one will deliver a 'powerful experience'. This aligns with rumors suggesting that the next Xbox hardware will be more powerful than Sony's PlayStation 6.
Hardware is absolutely core to everything that we do at Xbox, because we know that our most valuable players, the people who love Xbox, love the hardware experience, and so that is why we are working on our next generation hardware. It's going to be a powerful experience, and one that also enables people to take their library with them, and that's what's really important here as well, is that we know that while people want to play their library absolutely on the console, they also want to be able to play it on PC or stream it around the cloud. And so, the Xbox experience starts with the console, but then gives something to people that they can experience across all screens if they choose to, bringing their library, their community, their identity, and the store with them everywhere they go.
Not too long ago, rumors surfaced that Microsoft might be abandoning the console business altogether, following the dwindling sales of the current generation Xbox Series S and X hardware, but Bond stepped in to confirm that Microsoft is indeed still planning to produce new hardware in the future.
Of course, many gamers at this point wonder what the point is now that all Xbox games are available elsewhere, such as PC, mobile, and even previously rival console platforms. Brand fans used to answer that even without exclusives, Game Pass was too good a deal to pass on. That was true for a long time, but perhaps no more following the substantial price hike (+50%) for the Ultimate tier, which is now the only one to guarantee access to all first-party games, including the new Call of Duty, on day one.
In the chat with Fortune Magazine, Sarah Bond also briefly talked about Game Pass, clarifying that Xbox's approach is wider than simply reproducing Netflix in the gaming space:
People have said that, and I think it's that, but I also think it's more than that. We support every business model. So if you want to subscribe and get access to your library games, you can absolutely do that. If you want to buy your games and build up your own library, you can also do that. It's really about actually giving as much access and choice to people, to not locking into any one model, but letting people actually pick the way they want to consume their games, and also letting developers choose pick the way that they want to monetize their games and reach the most users.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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