Xbox’s new leadership double-act Asha Sharma (CEO Microsoft Gaming) and Matt Booty (chief content officer Xbox) have stressed the importance of new Xbox gaming hardware to their vision going forward.
Speaking to Windows Central, Sharma said: “I am committed to ‘returning to Xbox’, and that starts with console, that starts with hardware. You will hear more about that soon – we’ll have some announcements coming up. You will see us collectively investing here.
“We also know that there are a lot of players who aren’t on console or our hardware, and I want to deliver great games to them too. I need to learn more about what that can look like, what decisions were made, what we need to do going forward, and I want a little bit of time and space to do that.”
Matt Booty added: “Our studio system is fully built around being first-party. We’re not built to just be a publisher. It is core to our partnership with the Microsoft platform, being involved in early hardware decisions – all the work we’ve done to get games like Gears of War running great on new devices like the Xbox Ally, and so on. It is embedded within our structure, we’re not backing away from that. We’re committed to being a first-party games publisher in partnership with our first-party platform team.”
Their comments come after a wave of change unsettled the Xbox business and brand at the weekend, with long-time Xbox figurehead Phil Spencer retiring from Microsoft after nearly 40 years, and Sarah Bond, the former president of Xbox – presumed to be Spencer’s replacement-in-waiting – suddenly departing as well.
“This team has brought it back before, and I’m here to help us do it again” – Asha Sharma
Into the leadership void stepped Asha Sharma, a relative unknown to the gaming community, brought over from Microsoft’s CoreAI division, and someone who boasts no gaming experience or apparent gaming passion of her own. Matt Booty is a much more known quantity, having led Xbox Game Studios since 2018, and Microsoft’s first-party gaming output since 2023.
The suspicion surrounding Sharma’s appointment is Microsoft is sunsetting Xbox and reorganising the company around AI – something Seamus Blackley, the original co-creator of Xbox, was very vocal about. But there are contrasting reports that claim Microsoft genuinely wants to reset the Xbox business and turn it around. This “return of Xbox” is something Sharma talked about in her opening memo to staff, and it’s something she elaborated on in the Windows Central interview.
Sharma said: “For me, the spirit of ‘return to Xbox’ is about returning to the spirit that the team was founded on. It’s that spirit of surprise, it’s the spirit of building something nobody else was willing to try – I’ve heard ‘renegade’, ‘rebellion’, and ‘fun’ used. That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote that.”
Reports have suggested that Sarah Bond was ousted because of the ‘Xbox Anywhere’ initiative, largely attributed to her, which hasn’t really worked out. Regardless, it’s an initiative Sharma will inherit, alongside things such as Game Pass and publishing on PlayStation that have become increasingly central to the Xbox division’s core. What will Sharma do with them?
“Right now, I need to learn, candidly, about the ‘why’ of these decisions, what we were optimising for and what the data says about the Xbox strategy today. That’s the honest answer,” she said. “I’m looking at lifetime value, not just what happened in a previous moment, or in short term efficiencies and things like that. The plan’s the plan until it’s not the plan.”
Sharma also underlined her previously stated gen-AI stance by restating that there are opportunities there but she won’t allow this to devolve into okaying “slop”. “I will not flood our ecosystem with slop,” she said. “We won’t have careless output, we won’t have derivative work. I deeply believe in the words that I shared previously there.”
Matt Booty had an additional remark to make on this, stating: “We’ve got no pressure from Microsoft, there are no directives on AI coming down. Our teams are free to use any technologies that might be beneficial, whether it’s helping write code or check for bugs – things more in the production pipeline. At the end of the day as Asha said, we’re committed to art made by people. Technology is only in support of that.”
In closing, Sharma said she would try to “honour and uphold” the culture that Xbox Phil Spencer instilled – “a remarkable human and a remarkable leader” – when he took over Xbox in 2014. “We know that the business has gone through some challenges,” she said. “I’m going to use my expertise and the leaders that have the deep gaming depth around the table to help us grow the business, and make sure that we have an incredible next 25 years.
“I will listen, I will learn, I will communicate what we’re seeing, and what we’re doing. I think from here, the work is proof over promise. Matt and I are in it, every hour of every day of every night; I am fully in this thing. This team has brought it back before, and I’m here to help us do it again.”
