Two months into the job as Xbox CEO following Phil Spencer’s retirement, Asha Sharma launched an ambitious if somewhat vague plan for how to get the gaming platform back on track. It teased initiatives around new console features, affordability, and even a re-evaluation of Microsoft’s shift away from exclusive games. What’s the timeline for announcing her decisions on each of these fronts?
“We’ll take a data-driven approach and a strategic-driven approach, and then we’ll look at our principles and we’ll make some calls,” she told Game File‘s Stephen Totilo in a new interview when asked about future game exclusivity. Sharma added, “I want to make the right decision, not the fastest decision.”
She said choosing which games to bring to which platforms are “long-swinging decisions that have decade-long impact.” Last fall, Halo Studios announced that the future of Halo would be on PlayStation as well moving forward. When I asked Microsoft this week for comment on whether that was still the case, I was referred back to Sharma’s internal memo.
That pledge also hinted at Xbox trying to make gaming more affordable. Does that apply to hardware as well as things like Game Pass, which just got its first price cut ever? “I think, historically, our pricing hasn’t been as flexible,” she told Game File. “And I think that’s the big thing we want to go work on.”
Sharma continued, “I want to continue to make sure, as we build hardware, software, services, we’re spending just as much time on performance and play time as we are on making sure that we can innovate to offer more affordable devices and hardware and services. And so, look, there’s a reality to the market that we’re in, so there’s no promises around what the price points are or anything like that. But I want to make sure that people around the world are able to play.”
Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty was also part of the conversation, and hinted at where the company’s sprawling first-party development pipeline is heading. He said the teams have been working to establish a “predictable cadence, robust roadmap” and to “aim for quality” and that these goals will “create the conditions for the lightning in a bottle of winning Game of the Year.” Despite its nearly $80 billion in gaming acquisitions, that’s still something Microsoft’s never won.
