In case you weren’t aware… There has been a major shakeup with Xbox. Phil Spencer has retired and is no longer the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. Sarah Bond, the former President of Xbox, resigned. Taking over for Spencer will be Asha Sharma, the current President of CoreAI. Now, after a few days, a new report sheds some light on the major shakeup at Xbox and provides insight into how the news is impacting Xbox employees, how they felt about Sarah Bond’s leadership, and their uncertainty about Sharma and how it could impact Xbox.
The Verge reports that many employees believed the change in leadership started when Xbox started to shift into its concept of taking Xbox to as many platforms as they could,something that was spearheaded by both Spencer and Bond. Employees were reportedly confused by the “This is an Xbox” campaign and it allegedly offended many Xbox employees internally. The change in strategy hasn’t been what Microsoft has wanted, with revenue declining for three financial years in a row.
New Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma has promised “the return of Xbox,” in her official statement on her new position. She believed that the new strategy over the past few years has not worked. “I want to return to the renegade spirit that built Xbox in the first place,” Sharma said.
Despite Sharma’s intentions, there are some employees concerned that Sharma will force AI into everything. There are also some who believe she was appointed to act as a kind of executioner of the Xbox console.
Xbox Co-Founder Seamus Blackley sees it a little differently, albeit with a similar ending. In a new interview with GameBeat, he talks about the state of the industry, the future of the industry, the change in leadership, how Xbox might change and more.
“Satya Nadella has made an incredible number of bets and invested an incredible amount of money and credibility in the transform model AI future,” Blackley said. “Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business, is being sunsetted. They don’t say that, but that’s what’s happening. I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.
“It just seems really true,” he continued. “I imagine asking somebody if it made sense to put a major motion picture studio into the hands of somebody who didn’t like movies, or a major record label into the hands of somebody who’d never seen a live show. Why would you do that? Well, you only do that if you’re looking at the problem in a more abstract way.
“The natural consequence of the focus on AI is that AI abstracts every problem from the minds of the executives who believe in it. We’re abstracting the problem of games as well. There’s a core belief, and you can see it in what Satya said, that AI will subsume games like it will subsume everything.”
The Xbox co-founder said he believes that, “whether or not you agree with” generative AI, Microsoft is ushering all of its business units towards it, including gaming.
“That is in no way surprising,” he said. “It would have been shocking if they had somebody in there in a meaningful role who was passionate about games, passionate about the creator-driven business of games, because it would be in direct conflict with everything else Microsoft is doing.
“Microsoft is a company that is now about enabling its customers by enabling AI to drive things. That’s at odds with the auteur model of any art, but specifically of games. Microsoft doesn’t have the problem that Apple does, or that Netflix does, where they have an auteur-driven content model to manage. Games are the only place where they have a content business.”