Xbox CEO Wants to “Reset the Business” Over the Next 100 Days

We’re just two days away from Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase on June 7, and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma just set the stage for what will likely be one of the biggest events of the year for Team Green. At the Bloomberg Tech 2026 event in San Francisco, Sharma looked back on her first 100 days as the new head of Xbox and discussed her ambitions for what is probably Microsoft’s last big consumer brand.

The whole interview lasts around 15 minutes and is well worth a watch. Sharma, who previously worked at Instacart, Meta, and Microsoft’s CoreAI group, acknowledged that she had no gaming background. Because of that, the exec said that her first assignment was understanding the “soul of Xbox.”

We have already seen Sharma make some important changes, including dropping Game Pass prices and shipping new console features at a much faster pace. “The next 100 days are going to be about resetting the business,” Sharma said yesterday.

The new gaming CEO wants Xbox to become “the number one gaming and entertainment company.” However, Sharma admitted that Xbox still needs to find a balance between being a game publisher that releases games on multiple platforms, and trying to revive a struggling console business.

“Look, we’re the number two publisher in the world and, in order to be a great publisher, you must have your games reach large audiences to play,” Sharma said. “At the same time, we’re increasingly becoming a platform. In order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content, and so we’re looking at that very closely,” she continued.

In some way, this sounds a lot like when Xbox CEO Phil Spencer said, also in an interview with Bloomberg following the acquisition of Bethesda/Zenimax, that future Bethesda games would be released on other consoles “on a case-by-case basis.” Now that Forza, Gears of War, and soon Halo will be shipping on PlayStation consoles, it’s hard to see how Xbox can walk back from that path.

“I think that we have to be very thoughtful about each title, on how we want to think about it, and learn from similar cases in the industry. And that’s what we’re doing,” Sharma said. The upcoming Gears: E-Day has yet to be announced on other platforms, and I guess we’ll know more about that on Sunday.

While Sharma didn’t share any new details about Project Helix, Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox console, she did address the challenges of making consoles affordable at a time where RAM prices continue to rise due to the AI craze.

“Every generation around us is raising prices, but I don’t think you can raise prices through the hardware crisis that we’re seeing, and so it will require fundamental changes in terms of how we innovate and how we think about the business models, and how we go bring this to market, and we’re working on that,” Sharma said.

Later in the interview, the new Xbox CEO claimed that “My mandate is not 30% accountability margin. It’s not enterprise software margins. It’s to be the number one gaming and entertainment company. And that’s what we’re going to do.”

I guess we’ll see if the Xbox team is really ready to put its money where its mouth is on Sunday.