Nilay Patel

We'll be right back.

Hi, everyone.

This segment of Decoder Sessions features my boss, Helen Havlak, the Veritas publisher, and L'Oreal Group's Global Vice President of Tech and Open Innovation.

I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.

We're back with Verge senior reporter Tom Warren talking about the future of Xbox.

Before the break, we were discussing why executives Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond are out after years of trying various strategies to help Xbox catch up to the competition.

But now I want to get back to where those plans came from and pinpoint where it all started to go off the rails.

Let's talk about Xbox strategy as a whole.

Because if you're saying it's not changing, it's worth taking a beat to just understand what the goal has been.

And I would say since 2017, Phil Spencer has been very clear that what he wants to get to is everyone is subscribed to Game Pass.

You can play Game Pass games anywhere because they're streaming from the cloud.

And we're going to get out of this race of console generations and exclusives.

Because they had essentially lost to Sony, permanently lost to Sony.

There was no coming back with a new generation.

Did that work?

I mean, I think we know now there's executive turnover.

It didn't work.

But did it ever work?

Was there ever a glimmer of it working?

This is over a decade ago.