Microsoft’s New Gaming CEO Elaborates on the ‘Return to Xbox’

Yesterday, Phil Spencer publicly passed the Microsoft Gaming CEO baton to Asha Sharma, who also gave a first interview to Windows Central. Along with Matt Booty, Xbox’s new Chief Content Officer, the head of Microsoft’s gaming arm elaborated on the three commitments she made in her previous email to employees, which were the “return of Xbox,” “great games,” and the “future of play.”

As an outsider in the gaming industry, Sharma had already made it clear that her first job was to “understand what makes this work and protect it.” She also said in her internal email that she wanted to “return to the renegade spirit that built Xbox,” with a renewed commitment to console players.

“For me, the spirit of ‘Return to Xbox’ is about returning to the spirit that the team was founded on,” Sharma told Windows Central. “It’s that spirit of surprise, it’s the spirit of building something nobody else was willing to try — I’ve heard ‘renegade,’ ‘rebellion,’ and ‘fun’ used. That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote that.”

If the first Xbox console will celebrate its 25th anniversary in November 2026, it’s clear that enthusiasm for Xbox consoles has dwindled in recent years. Phil Spencer did his best to salvage the Xbox One generation, but the Xbox Series X|S generation may well end up as the worst one in terms of hardware sales. Xbox hardware revenue has declined for three consecutive financial years, and it’s hard to see how it can get any better after price increases and Microsoft’s abandonment of Xbox-exclusive games.

Xbox has been pronounced dead countless times, and even Xbox co-founder Seamus Blackley sees the new Microsoft Gaming CEO as “a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.” However, Microsoft can’t really give up on Xbox hardware if it doesn’t want its number of Game Pass subscribers to significantly drop. The company also wants to give an upgrade path to Xbox fans who may have invested hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars into Xbox hardware and Xbox games over the years.

“Xbox players have thousands of dollars invested, in money and time too — it’s incredibly important for me to understand that and protect that,” Sharma said. “I am committed to ‘returning to Xbox,’ and that starts with console, that starts with hardware. You will hear more about that soon, we’ll have some announcements coming up. You will see us collectively investing here,” she continued.

Matt Booty also emphasized yesterday that even though Microsoft is now a major game publisher that releases games on other consoles, Xbox hardware is still at the core of the company’s development pipeline. Xbox Cloud Gaming is also built with Xbox Series X hardware, even though Microsoft recently started to introduce a couple of PC games to the mix.

“Our studio system is fully built around being first-party. We’re not built to just be a publisher,” Matt Booty explained. “It is core to our partnership with the Microsoft platform, being involved in early hardware decisions — all the work we’ve done to get games like Gears of War running great on new devices like the Xbox Ally, and so on. It is embedded within our structure, we’re not backing away from that. We’re committed to being a first-party games publisher in partnership with our first-party platform team.”

“We’re going to make sure Xbox is a great place for developers and players,” Sharma added. “We want to invest in reducing the artificial divide between different types of devices that they want to use with us. I think that’s going to mean a lot more investment in breaking down the barriers, in helping developers build once and show up across different hardware experiences. For me, I believe Xbox starts with its fans, and we’ll grow from there. That’s what I wanted to signal with the “return” to Xbox.”

Lastly, Booty reiterated that despite Sharma’s previous background in AI, the new Xbox leadership team has no mandate to impose AI tools on game developers. “We’ve got no pressure from Microsoft, there are no directives on AI coming down. Our teams are free to use any technologies that might be beneficial, whether it’s helping write code or check for bugs — things more in the production pipeline. At the end of the day as Asha said, we’re committed to art made by people. Technology is only in support of that.”

The full interview with Sharma and Booty is very long, and it’s well worth a read. The two execs will likely be giving more interviews in the near future, but as Sharma previously said in her previous email to employees, she wants the Xbox team to “relentlessly question everything, revisit processes, protect what works, and be brave enough to change what does not.” The Microsoft Gaming CEO had a great one-liner to riff on that yesterday: “The plan’s the plan until it’s not the plan.”