Wasn't this supposed to be the year where we would be finally seeing Phil Spencer's first-party efforts?
There were two possible scenarios:
Scenario 1, Microsoft cared strongly about being a market leader in the console gaming space and wanted to hit back against Sony with a more powerful, competitively priced box featuring multiple big budget AAA exclusive first party games.
Scenario 2, Microsoft, under the leadership of Satya Nadella, in their process of steering the company away from the disastrous Devices push taken by his predecessor (of which the Xbox was a product of), agreed to give the Xbox division a relatively modest budget to make one final attempt to prove the Xbox is worthy of Redmond's time and if not, at least segway it's user base onto the PC.
For the last 2 years every sign has pointed towards scenario 2 but diehard Xbox fans who aren't really aware of the wider context of Microsoft as primarily an enterprise productivity software company insisted that E3 would prove scenario 1 to be true.
Well here we are, let this be the end of the debate. I can't even call this a failure or a bad conference, if I was in the position of the Xbox division heads with a limited amount of money to squeeze the remaining juice out of the brand I would probably just moneyhat a few timed exclusives and call it a day too. I don't really know what else people expected.