What you need to know
- Rumors recently suggested that Microsoft is effectively abandoning marketing Xbox in Europe and other regions.
- A recent interview with Xbox's marketing lead for Europe suggests the rumors might as well be true, noting that the firm is dramatically outspent by Sony PlayStation.
- Xbox sales in Europe in particular have been in decline for some years, with PlayStation by far the dominant console gaming platform in the region.
Recently, a newsletter by Tom Warren over at The Verge suggested that Microsoft has been exploring giving up on marketing its Xbox brand in Europe and other regions, in favor of the United States and other territories where it is more entrenched. Now, we have some confirmation that those rumors might as well be true.
During a new (paywalled) interview with Marketing Week, Xbox's EMEA marketing lead Michael Flatt had some surprisingly frank comments about the state of Microsoft's investment in Xbox in Europe, describing his team's need to be "scrappy" in order to compete.
"From a funding point of view, we need to work really hard against our competition," he said, pointing at PlayStation. PlayStation is by far the most dominant console platform in Europe, owing to decades of underinvestment and disinterest from the U.S.-centric Microsoft. Microsoft's global operations have long been criticized (by us too) for treating non-U.S. customers like second-class citizens.
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Flatt lamented that PlayStation "regrettably" outspends Xbox in Europe when it comes to marketing. "They're blessed with marketing funds that we're just not able to enjoy, but that's totally fine." Flatt continues, "We adopt what I would call a more fiscally responsible approach to media investments. We’re not blessed with huge media budgets, so we have to be quite scrappy really, and quite tenacious to fight for funds that would probably go somewhere else."
Flatt described his team's efforts as "scrappy," which is not exactly what I would personally want to hear from one of the world's top three most valuable companies, but Microsoft does find itself in a difficult macroeconomic confluence.
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Xbox fans have long criticized Microsoft's lackadaisical approach to marketing. I recently wrote about how perhaps great games aren't enough for Microsoft to grow Xbox, sharing anecdotes of the amount of times I ask every day gamers if they even know what the flagship Xbox Game Pass gaming subscription service even is — an alarming amount simply don't.
Microsoft has always had poor marketing compared to the likes of Apple, Samsung, and even Google arguably. Consistency is key when it comes to this kind of stuff, and Microsoft is anything but consistent when it comes to things like mindshare. My perception has long been that Microsoft has a general attitude of "if we built it, they will come," but that's simply not the case in reality. If you have two products that are identical, and one gets marketed in such a way that makes the potential customer actually feel good about it, which one will actually get sold? Microsoft's lack of visible urgency when it comes to Surface, Xbox, and even Windows itself, could be blamed for the struggles of an entire raft of products in recent years, even before we discuss things like software quality and customer service.
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Still, there's no guarantees with marketing. I felt like Hellblade 2 marketing was quite visible when I visited London recently, as well as across social media, but sales for the game have reportedly been quite poor. Like Michael Flatt says, he has to fight for the budget that might be spent elsewhere — budget that might be better spent elsewhere. It would be convenient if we could split into multiple timelines and examine the outcomes of binary decisions, but it's true that the overall global console user base hasn't really grown in years, despite the marketing from whoever is involved. Perhaps that money well and truly is better spent to maintain what is already there, and hope that a viral game or product does the marketing for you. Still, Microsoft is such a vastly huge company, I can't help but wonder why they can't afford to do both. But that's the world we seem to live in right now. Every company seems to be cost cutting and shrinkflating, and it seems Xbox EMEA marketing is another victim of that.
Despite all this, Microsoft has been touting its biggest ever Xbox presence for Europe's big Gamescom convention later this summer in Cologne, Germany. Microsoft has been investing more into Gamescom specifically in recent years, which is definitively a "marketing" event. I would argue that Gamescom hardly targets the mass casualized audience, though. Either way, it sounds like Michael Flatt and his team are making the best of a tough situation.
