Some scoops to note from this piece: - Xbox is planning a major overhaul of Game Pass that would have players choose features à la carte, including add-ons for console-only games, cloud gaming, and multiplayer. - Xbox and Windows teams have clashed over the OS for the next-gen hardware. - Sharma plans to release a next-gen handheld device by the 2027 holiday season and the next console by the holidays in 2028. - Sharma's planning the next rounds of layoffs for this month, November, and January (although layoff plans can change). - Next-gen console has internally been projected to cost consumers between $1,200 and $1,800, unless Microsoft decides to subsidize the cost.

Your side projects should be compounding very fast with AI. Every problem solved can be re-used or extracted into a generic module. Every design decision should make the next thing beautiful by default. Your agents should be constantly stealing from your past decisions.

Hey so fuck that guy

Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (labs.xbox.com). Here is the note that I sent to the team: Team, The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together. In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another. These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have. Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway. Asha

Someone needs to tell Noah at Instinct to focus on making managing household responsibilities incredibly easy for busy dual income families. This is the stickiness use case. That demo will absolutely pay for Instinct. Deprioritize the booking travel and shopping use cases.

Welcome home. October 13.