Xbox CEO on the Future of Xbox "The Most Played Games Are On Any Screen"

Oh, I love Direct. I love it. For me, there's obviously the behind-the-scenes, the teams and the studios putting all their work, letting us come in with our cameras and record stuff. And then seeing the community and how it responded is fantastic. So we all watched it together, we got together in a room here even though we'd seen it so many times, but we still just get a ton of energy from that. It was a good day. Good day.

I imagine in their offices holding where we're holding a Ryu statue. That was probably 2017, like when we started the 'hey, we should go do something.' And then I'd go over with Sarah Bond multiple times a year, we need to find the right studio to do the game. So when Platinum, we got them signed up. So it's been a good journey, it's been a long journey, but we waited because obviously the game's coming out in 2025. So in terms of launch, announced a launch, this is a pretty tight turn for us. I know when I was there last Tokyo Game Show, I was in offices and I was playing old Ninja Gaiden on my phone on cloud. And I saw somebody saw that I was playing. And to drop that in the show and the support we had from Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja and Platinum all up was just fantastic. Such a nice moment, especially for Xbox because we have such a history with the franchise.

My favorite... I usually try to take our own portfolio out because it's kind of unfair, I think. I will say I'm playing through retail of Indiana Jones, and I think MachineGames just did fantastic work. I love new franchises, kind of new IP, teams that are brave to go do that. Looking forward over the next year, so many games coming. I do have a soft spot for Doom, just given how many years Doom has been a part of my life. But I will say from the show, seeing Compulsion, their third game, their evolution of their capability as a studio, it's really nice to see Guillaume and the team and the progress they're making. And then there's stuff coming in the second half which I'm also really excited about. And obviously you can't... if you're in this... a ton of fun stuff to play.

No, it was not you. It was Will. Just kidding.

Yeah, let me start. Satya didn't talk about his answer, I'll just say I don't think I get to define what it means to be a fan of Xbox. Right? It's like your experience in the platform is different than mine, it's different from other people's. The biggest games, the ones that fuel reinvestment in new games that are coming, or games that are available in as many places as possible. So I want Xbox as a platform to be world class at connecting players and creators wherever those players might be. And whether it's on cloud, whether it's on PC, whether it's on our own hardware and our own platform which we love, or other places, we're constantly working at Xbox to make sure that everybody can play the games that they want to play. You know, one of the things I was really proud of yesterday at Showcase was we opened the show with the announcement that all of these games are Play Anywhere. And it was kind of just a text announcement, but for those of us that are playing on our different devices, I want to be able to play the games that I'm playing everywhere. I think we learn a lot as a platform by innovating in that space. So let's continue to innovate as a platform to allow the best games. And then from a fan standpoint, I think Showcase is a good example of this: let's make sure the best games will be on Xbox, and that people will be able to play it whether from our studios or other studios, and it's the best place to play those games.

It's really important in the AI space that we take the same lens of how do we use AI to make the player experience better. Power is important, more resolution means more power. So if you can actually use techniques to upres the screen, it makes the battery life longer. But when we think about AI at a fundamental level, it's: does it make our creators' jobs easier? Does it allow them to do things that they've never done before? And then on the player side, most of our AI investments today are all around safety and how we're making sure our services are as safe as they can possibly be. And we'll continue doing that. If we can make creators' lives easier and they can do things they've never done, and make our services more secure and better for our players, that's definitely a worthwhile investment.

I'm excited by the innovation that we're seeing in hardware, and frankly not just from us. But when you look in the industry right now, I mean CES, the headlines around new form factors for people playing video games on different devices. The Switch 2 announce was cool to see. I think we went through a period in gaming where there was either a desktop or a laptop or a console, and that was kind of it to play video games. Now you've got LG, we announced that you can play games there, you can stream games to different devices. So I like one of the things is just how many different devices are able to play the AAA video games that people love. And then making sure that our next devices are devices that are really defined by innovation and... you have to use the product, right? And that's what we do, whether it's the products that are in market today. I think it's important the partnerships that we have with the OEMs, thinking about our Xbox experience, the Xbox app and how it performs on smaller form factor, controller-driven devices, how we're streaming, how Game Pass shows up. It's not just on the device side, but yes, device innovation has to happen, but also our services, our UI, our games are tested on those platforms, on those screen sizes, on the devices that perform at that level of performance. It's a lot of work for us to stay on top of this, but it allows more people to play the great games that are out there. And for the industry, I just think that's a good thing.

The red lines, just to be clear, was me responding to an answer. Sometimes gets positioned if I kind of ran out with a red lines t-shirt on. We are finding that our games shipping on multiple platforms is a good thing for Xbox. It makes Xbox stronger. It lets us do shows like we did with Showcase with great games, give our game teams the time they need, for us to invest in platform, for us to invest in hardware. I think all of this is part of what Xbox is going to be when we go forward. When you ask the question, no, I mean there's Xbox games that have shipped that we're not going to put on other platforms. Some of the things will look at how they do, but you're going to see more games, not just... it's a good system for us that works. It doesn't mean every other company's got to do it that way, but it does mean I think that measuring our progress is different than maybe we measured the progress of Xbox or a console-only platform 10 years ago. It's why we talk a lot about players. I think a lot about the hours that people play on our platform, where we're seeing growth. And this has enabled us to grow in places that we don't normally. Our fastest growing region right now is Asia in terms of players. And I think about hours, our fastest growing hours is on cloud. It's us finding players in places that people want to go play. They want to buy a console, they want to buy a gaming desktop, great. Our games will be awesome there, our consoles will be a great place to play, but let's...

No. Like, I'm not... there's no specific game that I would... this kind of goes back to my red line answer. Like, there's no reason for me to put a ring fence around any game and say this game will not go to a place that it would find players, where it would have business success for us. What we find is we're able to drive a better business that allows us to invest in great game lineup like you saw. And that's our strategy, right? Our strategy is to allow our games to be available. Game Pass is an important component of playing the games on our platform, but to keep games off of other platforms, we don't think it's a path that we're going to. That's not a path for us. It doesn't work.

We want Xbox to be absolutely the platform that enables that. We think that makes us unique. Most of the other platforms out there are single platform on single device, whether that's PC, whether that's mobile, whether it's a console. And we want Xbox to be a platform that enables creators across any screen that people want to play on.