Nilay Patel

The Netflix-style Game Pass subscription service, a major push into cloud gaming, buying Activision Blizzard King, which makes Candy Crush, and many, many different iterations of Xbox hardware.

As of last year, he even had plans to bring Halo to PlayStation, something game industry insiders thought was basically impossible just five years ago.

But as you'll hear Tom explain, the game industry has been changing faster than Xbox has been able to transform itself, and almost none of Spencer's strategies have ever really clicked.

Xbox is still far behind Nintendo and PlayStation, and in PC games, it still stands in the shadow of Valve, which runs the dominant Steam store and now makes the Steam Deck handheld.

Microsoft has spent tens of billions of dollars trying to acquire its way to a stronger position against the rise of games like Fortnite and Roblox, mobile giants like Tencent, and a zero-sum war for attention dominated by apps like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

and yet it has very little to show for all of that.

And so today, Phil Spencer's grand vision of 100 million Game Pass subscribers streaming Xbox games to whatever screen they want on a cloud platform, well, that feels out of reach.

But as Tom says, it's not lost forever.

Xbox is far from dead, and there's hope that new leadership will take some big swings and make something happen again.

Okay, here's Verge senior reporter Tom Warren on the future of Xbox.

Here we go.

Tom Warren, you're a senior reporter at The Verge.

You are currently out on paternity leave, but Microsoft just brought you back.

It's just punishment for all of the scoops you have dropped on the company over the years.

So this week, as you were playing with your beautiful new baby, Microsoft initiated a major shakeup at Xbox, something we've seen coming for a little bit, but maybe not on this scale or this magnitude.

Describe what happened at Xbox this week.

And this is, I think, the shakeup, right?

We knew Phil was going to retire.

He'd been messaging that for some time.

He's been there for a long time.