During the video for Project Scorpio, two minutes of puffery dedicated to Microsoft's bright Christmas 2017, there is a man who speaks with his mouth but betrays everything with his eyes. "This doesn't mean we're leaving the Xbox One behind," he says, but the truth is there to see as his eyes flick away from the camera. Microsoft began its E3 conference by revealing the redesigned*Xbox One S*- and then, it still amazes me now, closed the show by telling everyone they'd be fools to buy any kind of Xbox One.
E3 conferences are about a lot of different things, but for a platform-holder one goal is paramount: make your hardware desirable, at once keeping the owners happy and making the non-owners want to buy it. Microsoft offered up iterative fare like Gears of War 4 (very pretty) and Forza Horizon 3 (which looked amazing), alongside a look at more original hopes like ReCore and Scalebound (not a great showing, though I keep the faith). All of these games are now subject to the Xbox division's bizarre new interpretation of the word 'exclusive,' which now means cross-platform.
With little fuss, the Xbox division has split its focus over both console and PC. This may be entirely down to Microsoft's wider Windows 10 strategy, but it's also a welcome opportunity to retreat from a head-to-head battle that Redmond is losing. Xbox is moving from being a box into being a brand of PCs-in-boxes that run Windows 10, with regular hardware upgrade cycles.
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