To recap for those who've been recently resting under a cool, mossy rock, Phil Spencer has now retired from his role as CEO of Microsoft Gaming. His replacement is Asha Sharma, who joined Microsoft in 2024—as president of its CoreAI product. This has resulted in a wave of doomsaying for Xbox that leadership has since been keen to dispel.But besides Sharma herself recently assuring that the gaming division won't "chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company will "always" invest in gaming during a recent internal Q&A. Sharma hosted the session in which, according to a transcript verified by Windows Central, the pair discussed their long-term vision for gaming at Microsoft.Nadella said that Xbox "at its best lifts the entire company." He also said, "The trickle from that excellence to the rest of the company becomes straightforward. I joke with [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang, if it wasn't for gaming, [Nvidia] wouldn't exist. Think about it, without DirectX, I don't think the entire GPU revolution, or the acceleration, would've happened.""That's why I'm long on it. Phil, he's always talked to me about how gaming is the largest entertainment category—what is gaming in its most expansive form going forward?" Nadella goes on to elaborate, "This doesn't mean we walk away from what people are doing today—when we think about a AAA game on a console. The question is about where else can we go to extend that?"
