One of the founders of the Xbox platform, Laura Fryer, published a new video on her personal YouTube channel to share her thoughts on the current state of Xbox, specifically Xbox Game Pass, following the service's price hike and the rising costs of the consoles, and she did not mince words.
She calls out Xbox leadership for being in a "bubble" and for not listening to player feedback. She called the video Microsoft published that went over the price changes to Xbox Game Pass "tone-deaf" and said that it is "further confirmation that the bubble at Xbox is real. Leadership doesn't understand what made them great. That 'yes man' culture that took over in 2008 has only gotten worse, and this is the result. A crazy price increase for their fans, after announcing that Game Pass had made $5 billion."
"...With these price hikes, it feels like a betrayal. Like greed over gaming."
Fryer directly calls out what the platform has lost in recent years, elements like a dedicated console that was the anchor of the ecosystem, exclusive first-party titles "that drove identity," and what she called "a true partnership" that used to exist between Xbox and game developers.
"Xbox wasn't created to sell hardware. It was about creating a closed loop where Xbox owned the customer relationship and the developer relationship. It was bigger than just one product."
She continues to say there is "no reason to stay" within the Xbox ecosystem, saying, "'This is an Xbox' is destroying all of the brand value built over the years. It was meant to be an inclusive message where everyone is welcome, but it ended up hollowing out the brand, because if everything is an Xbox, then nothing really is."
Before the video's conclusion, Fryer admits that she can understand the business reasons pushing the platform away from consoles and hardware and towards services like Game Pass, but stands firm that current leadership doesn't understand players or game developers. She does caveat that while she was part of building the brand, she and other founding members of the team often felt like they didn't know what they were doing.
It's from that perspective that she calls the current leadership "incompetent" and says that all of these poor decisions could come down to Xbox's leaders just "trying things."
"I can't say for sure where this is headed. It appears that Xbox is moving towards Cloud Gaming and away from hardware. But it also could be that they're just incompetent, that they just don't understand what they're doing, and they're trying things."
It should be said that Fryer is no longer with Xbox or Microsoft, and hasn't been for some time. She also clearly seems nostalgic for a period of Xbox and the videogame industry that simply isn't coming back. But that doesn't make her points about what current Xbox leadership is doing to the brand, and what the results of these price hikes outright wrong.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
