Xbox’s newly installed CEO Asha Sharma was the driving force behind Microsoft’s decision to quietly kill off the “This is an Xbox” campaign, according to a recent report by The Information.
All evidence of the campaign–save for a few YouTube videos–was scrubbed from the internet shortly after Sharma took the helm at Xbox earlier this month. According to “someone with direct knowledge of the move,” Sharma was the one who made the decision to end the campaign and remove it from Xbox’s various domains and social media accounts.
While Xbox is still pushing its “Play Anywhere” functionality, Sharma is also focused on rehabilitating Xbox’s console sales–Xbox hasn’t outperformed Sony and Nintendo consoles since 2008, after all. During her first town hall meeting with the team at Xbox’s Redmond, Washington HQ, Sharma said she wanted Xbox to be a “reference console”–that is to say, the ideal console against which every other console is judged.
“That resonated super well [with the team],” Xbox general manager Chris Charla said. “I think that people went from being pretty nervous–like, ‘What’s going on, what’s happening?’–to by the end of that day it was, like, seeing people had exhaled.”
It seems the first step to getting Xbox’s console sales where they need to be is doing away with mixed messaging about what an Xbox actually is. Right now, her focus is on Project Helix, Xbox’s upcoming PC/console platform.
Sharma was handpicked by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to replace former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer, who suddenly retired last month. Spencer’s protégé and former Xbox president Sarah Bond–who was reportedly the brains behind the controversial marketing campaign–resigned shortly after Spencer’s sudden retirement. Bond received significant criticism from players (and allegedly, internal Xbox employees, too) over the campaign, and was reportedly difficult to work with.
“If you didn’t follow the vision or questioned it, you were out,” one employee said of Bond’s management style.
Sharma, it seems, is taking a different approach.
“She wants to retain what makes Xbox great, but at the same time, she’s willing to question everything,” Xbox VP Jason Ronald said of Sharma’s plans for the future. “If you’ve been in the industry or in a certain role for a really long time, sometimes you build blinders where it’s like, ‘Oh, well, the industry just works that way.’ [Sharma] doesn’t come in with those biases.”