We see in music, in video, a lot of citizen creators. That traditionally the gaming industry has not actually been representative of all voices, has not actually been accessible to all creators. “And so a lot of our support of indies is actually grounded in that. “There is a real truth to the culture of Xbox and our belief in this statement,” she says. Appropriately, Bond’s wearing a “Gaming for Everyone” shirt in our interview, which she references when she talks about the program: We’re talking about Xbox’s new Developer Acceleration Program, which is intended to specifically support underrepresented developers with resources and assistance in bringing their games to Xbox. I bring up this observation in front of Xbox corporate VP Sarah Bond in an interview at the Game Developers Conference. It encompasses Xbox’s accessibility and sustainability efforts, its philosophy around reaching players on platforms other than just Xbox consoles, and its efforts to diversify its portfolio and game libraries. Now the key phrase isn’t “edgy,” it’s “everyone.” This has extended not just to Xbox’s most overt advertising, but also to more subtle things like who it puts out front to announce new games or initiatives in its public presentations.
Xbox of the early 2000s was for “gamers,” maybe, but not for me, despite my love of games.īut at some point in the mid-to-late 2010s, something began to change.
You can read their writeup for the full rundown, but in summary: Xbox’s brand identity used to be quite literally “edgy.” It was focused on “hardcore” gamers, its marketing was almost exclusively masculine, and, frankly, the whole business felt rather exclusionary. My tweet got picked up at the time by and inspired an interesting history lesson on the shifting of Xbox’s messaging over the years.
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