Xbox’s Head Of Gaming For Everyone & Sustainability Katy Jo Wright: “If You Don’t Intentionally Include, You Will Unintentionally Exclude.”

Xbox’s Head of Gaming For Everyone & Sustainability Katy Jo Wright announced the company will follow in Marvel Studios’ footsteps by embracing inclusion.

Wright revealed the company will be copying what Marvel Studios has been doing to the Marvel Cinematic Universe over the past half decade in an interview with Games Industry to promote the company’s Gaming For Everyone Product Inclusion Framework that was internally launched in 2019 and is now being made public. The framework was created by Wright’s Gaming For Everyone team that was created in 2015.

Specifically, Wright detailed the purpose of the entire framework, “If you don’t intentionally include, you will unintentionally exclude. That is how we are as human beings. There is no shame in that. If you want to include, you have to be intentional about that.”

Interestingly, this comment is similar to what BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said during an appearance at The New York Times’ DealBook back in 2017. Fink said, “You have to force behaviors. And if you don’t force behaviors whether it’s gender, or race, or, just any way you want to say, the composition of your team. You’re going to be impacted. And that’s not just recruiting, it is development as Ken said.”

When asked how he plans to force change, Fink said, “It has to be imbued in the culture of a firm. It has to be talked about. It has to be shown. Behaviors across the entire firm and entire region have to be similar. And every citizen of the firm has to understand what is acceptable behaviors and what are unacceptable behaviors.”

It’s all a conspiracy, they said. No one is trying to socially engineer corporate America, they said.

BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink: “You have to force behaviors…If [firms] don’t force behaviors, whether it’s gender or race…you’re going to be impacted.” pic.twitter.com/RDqtKOjQeM

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) June 5, 2023

According to Reuters, Fink reported in January 2023 that BlackRock lost $4 billion due to its embrace of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing in the United States.

In fact, by June 2023, Fink said he was going to stop using the term ESG, “I don’t use the word ESG any more, because it’s been entirely weaponised.”

Not only did Fink admit to losing $4 billion in 2023, but Wright’s comments are also very similar to how former Marvel Studios executive Victoria Alonso approached the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Back in 2021, Alonso appeared at the Annecy International Film Festival to promote the then upcoming What If…? series during a Women in Animation panel.

As reported by Deadline, during her appearance Alonso said she was asked, “Aren’t you tired every time your movie comes it’s number one in the world?” After claiming she finds that question “odd”, she said, “The reason we have that success consistently is because our audience is global. You cannot have a global audience and not somehow start to represent it… For us, it was really, really, really important to have that.”

Alonso continued, “For the longest of time, we heard a woman-led film will never open. I say, ‘Please check, Captain Marvel made a lot of money.’ Then they always told us that Black Panther was never going to open and that nobody wanted a completely Black cast, and that made $1.3B.

“So you can look at it from the social point of view, the cultural point of view. But truthfully, this is a business,” she declared. “From a fiscal point of view, you are leaving money on the table by not representing. I think 51% of our audience is female, 28% of our audience is Hispanic. If we don’t represent the people that watch what we make, eventually they’ll go elsewhere because somebody else will figure it out.”

She concluded, “We can only tell stories if we succeed and actually have money to make them. So the idea being, ‘If it makes money, why not make it?’ To me it seemed like a very simple equation, but it took a lot of time, a lot of talking.””

What’s actually happened is that the Marvel Cinematic Universe embraced this idea and began losing hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. Of the three films the company released last year, two of them, The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania lost significant amounts of money.

The third film, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 barely achieved profitability, but performed worse than both the original Guardians of the Galaxy film and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

It’s a bold strategy for Xbox given Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer admitted in an interview with The Wall Street Journal back in 2022 that the company was selling its Xbox X|S consoles at a loss of up to $200 per sale in the hope that it could recover the losses through Game Pass subscriptions and digital sales through the Xbox Store.

Spencer said, “Consoles are actually sold at a loss in the market, so when somebody goes and they buy an Xbox at their local retailer, we’re subsidising that purchase somewhere between 100 and 200 dollars, with the expectation that we will recoup that investment over time through accessory sales and the storefront.”

What do you make of Xbox and Katy Jo Wright’s strategy to embrace inclusion and spread it to other companies and developers?

NEXT: Baldur’s Gate 3 Actor Claims Diversity-Driven Storylines are Being Cut Throughout the Gaming World