Microsoft almost shuttered Xbox brand after Xbox One launch

Xbox has had a major resurgence in the last few years. With Game Pass, new first-party studios like Bethesda, and the powerful Xbox Series X, it’s a good time to be on the platform. However, in 2013… things were a bit more doom and gloom with Xbox One.

The Xbox One launched after a pretty bad lead-up to launch thanks to a controversial reveal event. When it released, it shipped with a forced Kinect peripheral and the console wasn’t totally ready for release. Microsoft wasn’t super happy with how the console was going and was doing some reshifting. According to current Head of Xbox Phil Spencer, he almost left and the Xbox division was almost shuttered.

In early 2014, Spencer and newly-appointed Microsoft CEO Satya Nedella had a difficult choice to make. Continue with Xbox to face a long uphill battle or throw in the towel?

“… the question is, do we go forward with Xbox? Because we’re getting really outsold by PlayStation in the market at this point. Do we stay invested in it? Or do we make a different decision,” said Spencer in an interview with Shacknews.

“He and I had a discussion, and I made a pitch. I said, “You know, gaming can be a real important consumer category for the company.” He didn’t quite understand it yet, not from an intelligence standpoint, but he just hadn’t been close to it. But he was willing to make a bet on us as a team. And I said, “The thing I need, if I’m going to step into the role to head this group, is I need to bring it back together. I can’t have my hardware team over there and the platform team over there, and first-party over there. I need to bring it back as a cohesive team.” And he agreed to that. So I ended up working in the Windows division, but we brought all those pieces back together,” said Spencer.

Spencer noted he was considering leaving Xbox before becoming its leader. His drive for seeing the brand and team succeed is ultimately what kept him around.

“I’m lucky enough to have been at Microsoft for a long enough time. I’m not really doing it for the next dollar. I don’t want another job. I don’t want to be CEO of Microsoft. This is the job I want, and the team and our players are the things that really drive me. That was true at that point as well. So I thought, If we’re going to go make a run at this, we have an amazing team, and I just wanted to empower them as much as I could and be part of that and continue to be continue to be part of that team.”

And thanks to Phil Spencer, Xbox is in better shape than ever.

The Xbox Series X is out now, we’ll have a full review very soon!