Image credit: Microsoft
Seamus Blackley, Xbox co-founder, has said he believes the brand will be “sunsetted” following the seismic shift in the company, with the departures of both Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond.
In a GamesBeat interview, Blackley said: “Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business, is being sunsetted”. His predictions for Microsoft’s gaming brand is not a positive outlook: “I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.”
These comments follow Asha Sharma’s appointment to EVP and CEO of Microsoft Gaming, which has been met with skepticism from the wider gaming community. Chiefly because Sharma’s background is in AI and not in running a global gaming brand.
“The job of all these people is to just gently usher all of these business units into the new world of AI. That’s what you’re seeing here.” It’s not a good outlook for Microsoft’s gaming brand, but this cynical take is not without merit, Blackley claims: “Games are the only place where they have a content business”.
It’s hard to argue against Blackley here. Sharma’s sudden ascent to CEO of Xbox comes after a brief two-year tenure in Microsoft. Previously, she was President of CoreAI product, with her role self-described as leading the “product portfolio for AI models, apps, agents, responsible AI, and developer tools for customers worldwide”.
Sharma was previously COO for Instacart, and before that, VP of Product and Engineering at Meta. There’s little in her resume that provides confidence in leading a major superpower of a gaming brand. With Microsoft leaning so hard into automation, it’s challenging much of anything positive going forward.
The end of Xbox as a gaming and software brand?
Let’s not mince words here, Xbox has had an uphill battle against PlayStation and Nintendo for years now. Credit to Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, both weathered a storm of trying to appeal to gamers; however, questionable marketing, a lack of exclusives on its platform, and the surrendering of its IP has the Xbox platform a tough sell.
You only need to look as far as the divisive and (ultimately) counterintuitive marketing from last year that claimed, “this is an Xbox”. While the strategy seemed to be opening Microsoft’s brand up to a wider demographic, telling people they did not need hardware to play its games, it more so reinforced the point that you probably shouldn’t waste your money buying it in the first place.
A new report published by The Verge claims that the campaign “offended many Xbox employees internally”, so it was not popular within the company, let alone to the wider gaming public. Xbox as a gaming brand has suffered for giving away the bulk of its IP, too, with the likes of Halo: Campaign Evolved and Forza Horizon 6 coming to PS5.
In other words, what’s the point of Xbox as a hardware company anymore? If Microsoft seems content to let its gaming brand be known for Game Pass and as a software publisher, then it seems as though it’s going the way of Sega at the turn of the millennium. A dark future for the once-great major player in the console war, now reduced to this.
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