Xbox’s New Leadership Team Discusses Current-Gen Consoles Support, Game Pass Growth, More

After Microsoft dropped the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass earlier this week, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty outlined yesterday their “master plan” to bring Xbox back to the top of its game. The two execs have since shared more details about what this “return to Xbox” really means.

In an interview with Game File’s Stephen Totilo, Sharma and Booty discussed what they’re going to do to make Game Pass sustainable, support the current generation of Xbox consoles, and make the next-gen Project Helix the best place to play. While it’s been just over 60 days since Asha Sharma replaced Phil Spencer as the head of Xbox, it’s clear that the new exec is ready to shake things up.

The “return to Xbox”

“The ‘’Return of Xbox’ really came from an ethos of: We have to restore the core,” Sharma told Totilo. “We have to restore the core fundamentals of our product and console. We have to restore the core and increase our strength on PC. We need to overhaul discovery and search, etcetera.”

Sharma announced yesterday that “Xbox” is once again the name of Microsoft’s gaming division, replacing the “Microsoft Gaming” identity that made its debut when Phil Spencer was appointed CEO of Microsoft Gaming back in 2022. This is a positive change to elevate the Xbox brand to the place it used to be.

“I can’t share guidance on what’s going to happen in general,” Sharma also said. “We are wanting to see Xbox return to growth next year, and so we’ve got work to do,” she added, later clarifying to Totilo that she was referring to Xbox division growth, not just hardware sales.

Sharma also said yesterday that the number of daily active players was Xbox’s new core metric, and she confirmed that in this new interview. “There’s no silver bullets, and our focus is going to be: how many players are playing every single day in the Xbox ecosystem,” the exec said.

Improving current-gen Xbox Series X|S consoles

“We have formed a team [and] we’re investing in console features,” Sharma said. “We are standing up the muscle to make sure that all of our performance and reliability and quality is great. We are investing in it as a first-class experience again, and we want to make sure that all the players who want to be on Gen 9 are on Gen 9 with a great console with regular updates.” Sharma also added that “We know we just haven’t invested as much there and so we’re getting back to that.”

Speaking about hardware and software prices, Sharma said that Microsoft will do its best to make gaming affordable, but admitted that the Xbox team has to navigate through a complex economic environment. As a reminder, this is the first console generation where hardware becomes more expensive instead of getting cheaper.

“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,” Sharma said.

Game Pass and exclusive games

Microsoft finally dropped the price of its Game Pass subscriptions this week, and it did so by abandoning day one availability for future Call of Duty games. This was the right thing to do as Sharma acknowledged that Game Pass had become too expensive for most gamers.

“To grow a subscription business, you need more players who love the subscription, that are staying longer and that are happy,” Sharma said. “We think that this decision is going to give us all three of those.

The exec added that the Xbox team will explore different options to make Game Pass more attractive to different audiences. We’ve already seen that with the leaked Game Pass Starter Edition that Discord is planning to offer to its Nitro subscribers. While Sharma didn’t share more in the interview, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters recently said that he discussed new subscription bundle ideas with Sharma.

For a while, the main selling point of Game Pass was the day-one availability of Microsoft’s first-party games. However, Microsoft is now shipping most of its games on rival consoles, with some of them, like the upcoming Fable, coming to PlayStation 5 on day one. Sharma openly said that choices around exclusive games are “long-swinging decisions that have decade-long impact.”

“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. So we’ll share more when we’re ready,” she said. When pressed by Totilo on a specific timeframe for making these decisions, Sharma replied “I want to make the right decision, not the fastest decision.”

Project Helix and PC Games

While we already know that Project Helix will play Xbox console and PC games, Totilo asked Sharma if the next-gen Xbox will support third-party game stores in addition to the Microsoft Store. Steve Allison, the head of the Epic Games Store, previously told Totilo that Microsoft had expressed support for this idea. “We definitely plan to be on the new hardware for Xbox, because, unless their policy or stance on it changes, they are telling us they’re going to welcome that,” Allison said in February.

Well, Sharma didn’t want to confirm to Totilo that Project Helix will really welcome third-party game stores. “So what we shared with our team is that we want the platform to be open for more people to create on the platform and more players to participate in customizing and extending that,” Sharma said.

When asked about what Allison previously said, Sharma replied “I wasn’t part of those conversations, so we’ll make those decisions going forward as a team and with our partners. We’ll share more when we can.”

Even though Sharma and Booty are still keeping their cards close to their chests, the long interview with the two execs is well worth a read. It’s also likely that the new Xbox leadership team will be doing more interviews over the coming days.