Since Asha Sharma stepped up as the CEO of Xbox after Phil Spencer retired in February, one of her core focuses has been reinforcing the core of the brand with things like major improvements to Achievements and a wide variety of new features brought to the Xbox experience at the end of April. Sharma is also responsible for the recent big Xbox Game Pass price cut and the end of "Microsoft Gaming."
At the same time, Sharma shared a massive manifesto for Xbox's future a few weeks ago, declaring that "Xbox will be where the world plays" as she laid out four main priorities for the brand moving forward: hardware, content, experience, and services. These key pillars were at the heart of a 40-minute company-wide meeting Sharma held — a meeting that we now have some great quotes from, thanks to inside sources.
"We have to be honest about where we are. We’ve got work to do," Sharma said, according to sources in contact with The Verge. "Players are frustrated with us, they feel like we haven’t updated our console enough, they feel like our PC presence isn’t very strong."
Indeed, we've written about issues with Xbox on PC before, and it's no secret that many Xbox console users feel like Microsoft doesn't make their experience a priority. So, to address that and right the ship, Sharma has ambitious plans to make more frequent updates to Xbox platforms, and even plans to push console updates every two weeks to "fix the fundamentals."
"We’re going to start by restoring our core. We have to fix the fundamentals on console and PC," she told Xbox staff. "We have to sweat every single detail and every single part of the experience to get to fun much faster and make it simpler."
Reportedly, Sharma also touched on exclusivity, echoing recent comments that she and the Xbox team will "make some calls" on the potential return of Xbox exclusives, but doesn't want to make a decision too hastily. She's apparently in the process of evaluating a few different options; personally, I expect we'll see Microsoft make first-party single player titles exclusive, but allow multiplayer-driven ones like Forza Horizon 6 to jump to PS5 and/or Nintendo Switch 2.
Ultimately, her goal is to draw fans in and keep them playing in the Xbox ecosystem once they are; this lines up with a recent statement that daily active users will be the "north star" for the brand. "We will focus on players coming back every single day, because our platform and our games are great," she said. "We have to execute really well to get there, and we’re going to do that in a four-point plan, and it starts with hardware."
The core of Xbox's hardware efforts will revolve around its upcoming ambitious PC-console hybrid system, Project Helix, which is expected by many to come in 2027. "We have to deliver Project Helix as a big step forward, for our console games and also our PC games, as well as performance and security," Sharma noted.
Lastly, in a recent memo, she also commented on her recent shakeup of Xbox leadership that saw her promote veteran employees and bring many of her colleagues from Microsoft's CoreAI team into the fold. The move was accompanied by the end of Copilot development on Xbox, assuaging fears of a focus on generative AI.
"Right now, it is too hard to ship impact quickly; we spend too much time inward instead of with the community, and we lack the capability we need in some key areas," Sharma wrote. "We are promoting leaders who built Xbox and bringing in new leaders with consumer and technical expertise we do not yet have. This will allow us to go deeper in the areas that matter most and move faster."
Overall, I think Sharma has done an excellent job leading Xbox thus far, though we're still in the very early days. Still, she's shown quite a drive to deliver what fans are asking for with her plan for "the return of Xbox," and I hope that continues moving forward.
How do you feel about Asha Sharma so far? Let me know in the comments, and in our poll.
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