With Asha Sharma at the helm, Xbox is making moves. It’s trying to speed up overdue updates for features on console, it’s changing Game Pass to try to bring down the cost, and it’s even ditching the “Microsoft Gaming” corpo-speak that came into vogue after the gaming division became way more than just a console business following the Activision Blizzard acquisition announcement. Now Microsoft’s recently minted gaming executive is doing something even more unusual: making her pitch directly to Xbox players on how she plans to fix the platform and where it’s headed next.
“Players are frustrated,” Sharma wrote in a memo to staff that was shared with the rest of the world on Xbox Wire. “New feature drops on console have been less frequent. Our presence on PC isn’t strong enough. Pricing is getting harder for people to keep up with. And core experiences like search, discovery, social, and personalization still feel too fragmented. Developers and publishers are asking for more, too: better tools, better insights, and a platform that helps them grow faster.”
She goes on to lay out all of the headwinds traditional AAA game makers like Microsoft face, including the rise of PC gaming where competition is fierce, the popularity of live-service social platforms like Roblox and Fortnite where new content is cheap and endless, and game industry growth stagnating outside of places like China. It reads like a greatest hits summary of venture capital analyst Matthew Ball’s recent 2026 state of gaming report.
Console is core but it’s no longer enough
Where does this leave Xbox, a console turned multi-device platform whose meaning has been diluted by constant strategy pivots and a recent shift from exclusives to multiplatform releases that makes Microsoft feel more like a third-party publisher than one of the big three console gaming platform holders?
“Console is at the foundation,” Sharma writes. This suggests that while PC, mobile, and cloud remain a priority, those will be extensions of the dedicated gaming device ecosystem rather than a replacement of it. “Xbox will be built to be affordable, personal, and open,” she adds, suggesting that Project Helix, Microsoft’s next-gen console push, might not be exclusively in the high-end PC gaming price point range originally teased by predecessor Sarah Bond.
At the same time, Sharma writes that “Our new north star will be daily active players.” Microsoft has 500 million of them across everything from people playing Candy Crush on smartphones to Game Pass subscribers streaming Plants vs. Zombies. Daily active players are not console sales, or game sales, or even subscriber numbers. It’s total people logging in to play something Microsoft owns. How do you maintain Xbox as a console identity while casting such a wide net?
Stay rebellious but maintain cost discipline
The new head of Xbox outlines a long to-do list that includes everything from “Stabilize Gen9 as a healthy and high-quality base” to entertaining additional acquisitions and mergers where “organic paths are too slow.” It’s a 16-point plan that doesn’t sound entirely different from what Phil Spencer had been doing for the last five years, including perhaps the most ominous bullet point: “Return the business to durable growth with strong cost discipline.” Is growth not already durable? Is the cost discipline not already strong? Are we headed to another summer of Xbox layoffs?
It’s also not yet clear what Sharma’s current tour of the business, including its many first-party studios, will yield when it comes to the biggest question on players’ minds: exclusivity. “Along the way, we will reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI, and share more as we learn and decide,” she writes. This is the second time Sharma has mentioned the e-word, and some diehard Xbox fans have already been speculating on whether the flow of games like Halo to PlayStation might be slowed or stalled in the future. Already Forza Horizon 6 is coming to PS5 on a delay, and Gears of War: E-Day hasn’t yet been confirmed to be anything but an Xbox Series X/S console exclusive.
The Microsoft executive’s memo ends with a list of 10 core values for the Xbox team, beginning with “Earn every player” and “Protect our art” and ending with ChatGPT-sounding alliterations like “Makers over managers” and “Clarity is kindness.” Two months into the job, Sharma writes, “We’re proud of how we’ve honored our commitments of great games, return of Xbox, and future of play. We’re here to do the most creative and courageous work of our lives, and that’s what we’ll do together.” The first big test of that will comes in June with Microsoft’s big summer Xbox gaming showcase and the return of its live Fan Fest events, but we won’t really have a sense of how real this shift is until the launch of Project Helix. It could be a return to Xbox or just a return to better marketing slogans.
