Microsoft’s latest fiscal quarter wrapped up last week and according to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, the company’s gaming division had a good one. She reportedly rallied her team around a number of recent successes and goals for the platform’s future during a recent company townhall discussion. The big Xbox reset, including ongoing rounds of brutal layoffs, has reversed the platform’s “freefall,” she said.
“We’re making the right decisions to reinvest in the business, after an all-time low, we’ve started to return to growth, more than 2 to 3 times what we were, and we expect that to continue,” Sharma told staff according to new reporting by Windows Central. She also pointed to “strong starts” for Minecraft Dungeons 2, Gears of War: E-Day, and World of Warcraft: Forever, and claimed a 30-percent boost in “brand sentiment” from a year ago.
The CEO reportedly also laid out goals for strengthening Xbox as a console platform in the future. These include initiatives like Play Anywhere and Disc-to-Digital, as well as making Xbox easier to develop for and making Game Pass subscriptions “more flexible.” There was also a special shoutout for bringing The Witcher 3 to Battle.net, suggesting it won’t be the last of these curated cross-collaborations on Blizzard’s PC launcher.
But what’s most likely to raise eyebrows among Xbox fans are Sharma’s remarks about Xbox’s Gen 10 hardware, Project Helix. “We are moving to a family of devices for Gen 10,” she said, according to Windows Central. “There is not one device that fits all. We will certainly have a great console first, but we also know that many players will be on the go. There are some things that we are the best in the world to manufacture, and there are other things that will we partner on. So, we will be sharing more about that as our plans develop. The operating system is starting to look really good. We’re very excited about this.”
We may already have a preview of this arrangement with the existing Xbox Series X/S devices, gaming PCs that run Windows, and the third-party Xbox Ally X made by Asus. It remains to be seen just how many members of the “family” of Gen 10 devices Microsoft will make internally, and how robust the operating system to unify the Xbox experience across them ends up being.
But it will be hard for many working within Xbox to celebrate any of this newfound momentum just yet. Chief content officer Matt Booty said last month that Xbox is only 75 percent of the way through its painful reset, and there are still hundreds of more staff to be laid off in the months ahead. And some of the company’s biggest gaming bets under Sharma, like rebooting Halo under Activision, will take many years to come to fruition.
