In an industry dominated by men wearing ratty graphic tees and sneakers, Loftis is chic and professional. It’s mid-morning and quiet: a couple dozen employees pass by, but all you hear is the mechanical clack of the coffee machines and the dull pop of a virtual grenade detonating in a testing room a few doors down. A life-sized Halo statue, guns ready, stands in the lobby beneath us. We’re sitting in a break area on the third floor of Xbox’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Employees talk about Loftis the way soldiers brag about a takes-no-shit commander As general manager of Microsoft Studios, Loftis is in charge of producing the next crop of Microsoft video games. "This year really felt like I came home," says Shannon Loftis. During the hour-long kick-off presentation, six minutes were allotted to new game announcements. Microsoft only forgot one thing: the games. In theory, the Xbox One was an improvement on everything fans loved about the Xbox 360: a more powerful Kinect, new hardware that merged the console with your cable box, and lots of talk about the cloud. By the time the company announced the Xbox 360’s successor - Xbox One - three years later, the company was riding a tsunami of success. When it launched the Kinect motion controller in 2010, Wired called the event "the most lavish product launch" in video game history - complete with Cirque du Soleil performers, an animatronic elephant, and an Xbox orb large enough to crush the front row. With each opulent press conference announcing a new product, Microsoft seemed more confident. As entertainment trended away from physical media and cable subscriptions, the Xbox 360 felt like a test run for Microsoft’s plan to one day control the living room. In its first eight years, the Xbox 360 established the company as a powerhouse in the games industry, and one of the best options for streaming apps like Netflix, Hulu, and Pandora. Nobody was more surprised by Xbox’s fall from grace than Microsoft.
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