Asha Sharman is the new CEO of Xbox and has arrived with a mission: to blow up Xbox. At least, that is what he is proposing in the first three months of his mandate in which he took the reins of the company in one of the worst moments in its history, with a diffuse identity and with the responsibility of filling the shoes of a Phil Spencer who had been with the company for 40 years. The most curious thing is that Sharma came from presiding over CoreAI, one of Microsoft’s most important AI divisions, and is doing the opposite of what many of us expected.
Dismantle AI from within.
Distrust. The Xbox brand is not going through its best moment. Since the disastrous E3 in 2013 where the Xbox boss said that if someone didn’t want an always-connected console (Xbox One) they could stick with their old Xbox 360, things have gone downhill. That someone was a Don Mattrick who was replaced by Phil Spencer and with whom things began to change. Game Pass, studio purchases to feed the ecosystem and strategy changes such as launching games on PC and PlayStation.
The accounts seemed to come out in services, but not in hardware or games. After all this time, Phil retired and a totally different profile arrived: that of Asha Sharman. The directive I wasn’t a gamer like Phil, he also had no gaming experience. He came from leading CoreAI, a Microsoft team focused on accelerating the development of AI software for internal and external customers to build and run AI applications and agents.
Out with the AI. When it was announced that she would be in charge of replacing Phil, in the midst of the ‘Microslop’ meme, many of us feared the worst for the division. Even one of the fathers of Xbox He pointed out that Sharma was going to bury Xbox. However, through Twitter, the CEO has just launched a release quite interesting:
“Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection to the community, and address friction for both players and developers.”
It would seem like just another message, that typical ‘CEO language’ that so many managers use, but it has gone one step further by committing to something interesting:
“Today we promoted leaders who helped build Xbox while bringing in new voices to help us move forward. This balance is important as we get the business back on track.
As part of this change, we will begin removing features that do not align with our intentions and plans for the future. “We will begin scaling back Copilot on mobile devices and will stop development of Copilot on consoles.”
CoreAI Avalanche. This implies a shift in the strategy of a Microsoft that, like others like Meta, they had become an AI company. They have pushed Copilot to its limits, putting it on capon even on televisions thanks to commercial agreements or by renaming its office suite so that, now, its most important services were Copilot and, therefore, artificial intelligence. These statements, therefore, represent an interesting change, as interesting as seeing who are those who now manage Xbox.
Sharma talks about “new voices” and what contrasts with this plan to dismantle Copilot in some of the products is that many of them come from… CoreAI. As they point our colleagues from 3DJuegos, The Verge raises a list of four very important members of that AI division who, now, come to Xbox to work with Sharma when defining the future strategy and the new machine: Project Helix.
Return to fan. It is not Sharma’s only turn in this short period at the helm of Xbox. From the “everything is an Xbox” campaign, tremendously controversial because if everything is an Xbox, nothing is, we move on to a “we are xbox“, a return to those origins in which an Xbox is an Xbox, and that’s it. Well, also the PC, which is receiving its ‘Xbox mode‘ to improve the video game experience.
There is rumors that they are considering returning to exclusives (PC and Xbox) abandoning launches on platforms such as PlayStation 5 and They have lowered the price of Game Pass Ultimatethat it was shot a few months ago. Of course, although they lowered the price, they also left ‘Call of Duty’ out of the subscription, so that reduction is misleading.
I want to believe. Now, you have to be careful with all this. Although they are already taking some actions (that “reduction” of Game Pass or stopping the development of Copilot on Xbox), the return to exclusives and the roots of Xbox are issues that remain to be seen. Until they start taking more forceful action, we won’t be able to assess how far Sharma has gone to do things differently.
Furthermore, and it is not to look for spins on Sharma’s statements, the board has pointed out that they stop Copilot on consoles. And that word, “consoles,” is very important because we don’t know what Project Helix will be. Your new machine definitely cannot be classified as a console because the machine itself Microsoft is positioning it as a PCone in which the crisis of components will impact strongly both in availability and price and it remains to be seen if they miss that opportunity to bring AI to the living rooms.
But well, it is evident that the new CEO has arrived at Xbox wanting to wage war and we can think “ok, but above it is someone with more power: Satya Nadella.” And yes, Nadella has been one of the great drivers of converting Microsoft into an AI company, but just yesterday the company’s CEO sent a powerful message: clean Windows of so much garbage to win back the fans. Only time will tell, but it is evident that Microsoft’s image is not going through its best moment.
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