Microsoft has had an amazing turnaround as far as its perception goes over the last few months, and that has a lot to do with its great conferences that it held at E3 and Gamescom, where it made a bevy of exclusive game announcements, while also highlighting how the Xbox One would continue to grow and evolve as a machine.
This happened largely because of some thorough foresight and planning on Microsoft’s part- they had a lot of announcements and things to show off, and instead of just cramming them all into one conference, they made the wise choice to spread things out, and also sustain their momentum better that way.
“We actually planned E3 and Gamescom at the same time this year. We had enough content, I think, to show at two big shows. I kind of felt that way yesterday, I looked at the Quantum Break demo, which I thought was fantastic, and that could easily have been in our E3 show and vice versa. We treated Gamescom as a top-tier show and we had 90 minutes of content I was really proud of.
“It was nice to have the third party support. Just Cause looked really good, having Dark Souls in the show was great. All the teams spend so much time preparing for these shows, and many of them have games to ship this fall. The ability to juggle those things – I felt good about the show,” Xbox head Phil Spencer told Eurogamer.
It is a strategy that has paid off, and allowed Microsoft and Xbox to be the topic of discussion constantly, even as PlayStation seems to have had an off year following their otherwise stellar E3 showing. Whether or not this positive mindshare translates to increased marketshare for Microsoft remains to be seen, but they certainly deserve any success they get now if it does.
