After publishing a company wide memo on her plans for Xbox earlier this week, freshly-minted Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has given a rare – if less than candid – interview, elaborating just a tad more on team green’s future.
Much of the conversation, held with reporter Stephen Totilo for his Game File newsletter shortly after the memo went out, continued the theme of making only heavily-guarded promises. Sharma explained that “fortifying Game Pass”, for instance, means roughly what you’d expect: Xbox is aiming to grow the subscription, for which Sharma says you need “more players who love the subscription, that are staying longer and that are happy.” That Game Pass price cut, she added, “is going to give us all three of these.”
But the headline snippet is Sharma’s refusal to rule out the return of console exclusives, something that’s been mooted and rumoured since she took over earlier this year. “We’ll take a data-driven approach and a strategic-driven approach, and then we’ll look at our principles and we’ll make some calls,” she said, describing this as an example of “long-swinging decisions that have decade-long impact.”
When pushed on whether she had a timeframe for deciding, the response was similarly non-committal. “Nothing we’re ready to commit to,” Sharma replied, before promising, “We’ll share more when we’re ready.” Sharma also emphasised she’d only been in the role for 60 days, adding: “I want to make the right decision, not the fastest decision.”
Discussion around exclusivity had already been swirling after Sharma’s earlier memo, where it was briefly mentioned the platform will “reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI.” But this marks the first time Sharma has been directly asked – and directly commented on – console exclusivity itself.
If that approach does change, it would mark a drastic shift in philosophy for Xbox – and one in line with the significance of ditching its “This is an Xbox” approach to getting its games everywhere. Its parent company, Microsoft, went through protracted regulatory battles and paid $68.7bn to buy megapublisher Activision Blizzard King in 2023, as well as snapping up Bethesda owner ZeniMax Media for $7.5bn in 2020.
The going theory at the time – and really since – has been that Xbox would have to get its games in front of more people in order for that astronomical investment to pay off. Hence the seemingly inevitable flow of first-party Xbox games to other platforms, namely direct rivals Nintendo and PlayStation, most recently in the form of once-exclusive Starfield’s arrival on PS5. To change direction would imply serious confidence on Xbox’s part that it can convince players to return en masse to what is now a heavily damaged Xbox brand – presumably with the next generation.
Until then, there are a few other tidbits in the interview. Xbox head of content Matt Booty joined Sharma for the chat, promising a not-at-all corporate-sounding target of “predictable cadence, robust roadmap, aim for quality” amongst Xbox studios. Meanwhile there’s an implied promise of more updates to the current generation of Xbox hardware – “we are investing in it as a first-class experience again,” Sharma said – and notably a few lines on the promise of affordability.
There, Sharma said, “I want to continue to make sure, as we build hardware, software, services, we’re spending just as much time on performance and play time as we are on making sure that we can innovate to offer more affordable devices and hardware and services. And so, look, there’s a reality to the market that we’re in, so there’s no promises around what the price points are or anything like that. But I want to make sure that people around the world are able to play.”
Altogether it makes for a bit of a deluge of Xbox news over the past 24 hours or so. As well as the open letter and this interview, there’s been the reveal of a new, decidedly un-Microsoft Xbox logo, and a leaked “Starter Edition” tier to Game Pass, which feeds in rather nicely to Sharma’s promises above.
As for whether all this is enough to start turning things around, we’ll have to wait – presumably until a few more hard decisions are made.
