A Better Tomorrow

Microsoft heads to XO18 to celebrate Xbox One – but reveals its gaze is fixed on the future

Fortnite may be the biggest game on the planet right now, but surely there were better ways to open an Xbox livestream than with a montage piece of various people in freefall. Optics are everything, after all, and this was, we assume quite unintentionally, a bit on the nose. Still, Microsoft will feel like it left this event having stuck the landing. Insofar as the company has ever had a coherent set of goals for Xbox One, it at least had a core message here, and it drummed it in relentlessly. You could sum it up in two words, were it not repeated so often. Game Pass, Game Pass, Game Pass.

Notionally the first event of its kind, XO18 was in fact a rebadging of the Xbox Fanfest in Mexico City, which has been running since 2014. It’s easy to see why Phil Spencer and crew are drawn back here year after year, and it’s not just because of Spencer’s belief that Latin America is a real growth opportunity for Xbox. No, the real draw is the crowd. They come, shall we say, to party.