In her introduction email to Xbox employees, Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming and former president of Microsoft’s CoreAI, promised a return to Xbox. This, among many other things about the announcement, raised some questions, with perhaps the most relevant being, “What does that even mean?”
Windows Central sat down with Sharma and new CCO Matt Booty to ask just that. Instead of clarifying her plans, Sharma offered vaguely positive-sounding platitudes that amounted to little of substance. “For me, the spirit of ‘Return to Xbox’ is about returning to the spirit that the team was founded on,” Sharma said. “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.”
Sharma did, at least, acknowledge that she has a lot of work to do before making any big decisions, but it’s bizarre that Microsoft would just set her loose for interviews when she admits she still has so much to learn about Xbox. When asked about Xbox getting rid of game exclusives and whether or not that policy might be revised, she said, “Right now, I need to learn, candidly. About the ‘why’ of these decisions, what we were optimizing for, and what the data says about the Xbox strategy today. That’s the honest answer. 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.”
On the subject of AI, Sharma reiterated that she wouldn’t “flood [the Xbox] ecosystem with slop,” and said she stands by what she wrote in her introduction email. Booty jumped in with further clarification, adding, “We’ve got no pressure from Microsoft, there are no directives on AI coming down.”
Overall, the interview is light on concrete details about Sharma’s vision for Xbox. As she said, “I think from here, the work is proof over promise.” We’ll just have to wait and see what that work actually looks like.