This has, without doubt, been the most significant few weeks for Xbox since Microsoft confirmed it was breaking the bank to purchase Activision Blizzard. Xbox has a new CEO, Asha Sharma, and former leaders Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond have announced their retirement and departure, respectively. Sharma has swiftly moved to negate concerns about her background in AI. Project Helix, Xbox’s next generation of hardware that will be a PC-infused home console, has been confirmed. It’s all going on. In a show of support for the new Xbox boss, the head of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, joined her for a town hall with employees, and now a new report has revealed what was said.
While there’s certainly been some positivity about the changing of the guard at Xbox (I’d place myself in the cautiously optimistic category), it’s safe to say there’s been a lot of skepticism as well. Commentary has ranged from ‘this is the fresh perspective Microsoft’s gaming division needs’ to ‘Sharma is Xbox’s palliative care doctor.’ For some, the future is rosy, for others, it’s just become even more bleak.
Appearing alongside Sharma in this town hall meeting with staff, Nadella (who I feel has been quite distant from Xbox recently) has reportedly assured that Microsoft is still “long” on gaming and still sees it as a vital sector to compete in. That’s according to Windows Central, who has heard Nadella’s remarks and verified them with sources.
“Phil [Spencer], he’s always talked to me about how gaming is the largest entertainment category – what is gaming in its most expansive form going forward?” Nadella allegedly says. “This doesn’t mean we walk away from [what] people are doing today – when we think about a triple-A game on a console. The question is about where else we can go to extend that. For me, we’re long on gaming. We’ll continue to invest, and we’ll always do so. It’s up to this team to show an excellence in execution, and creativity. Software always carries risk, but this is software with lots of creation risk. It’s way different. But yet, we have to be the best-in-class at it.”
Despite Nadella’s desire to look forward, he also seems wary about ignoring what Xbox already has. “We have to make sure that the friends we have today are the friends that you have tomorrow,” he says. “You want to wake up feeling like your friendship has even grown stronger. We have to really make sure, whether it’s console, whether it’s PC, whether it’s the lover of Forza, Halo, we really want to make sure they love us for what they expect us to do.”
Recent reports have also demonstrated that videogames aren’t just competing among themselves and other entertainment forms like movies for consumers’ time and energy – social media platforms like TikTok pose an enormous threat to attention. Nadella acknowledges this, and wants Xbox to fight back against this trend with its games and products.
“Attention is a finite thing humans have. How can we earn permission, tastefully, for more of that attention? It brings joy back… that’s the thing I always think about. Gaming is an active engagement. It’s not that passive ‘scrolling’ on things, and so on. I do want us to be the ones to bring back that active engagement. That’s what console and PC represents in some sense. Why do people love the controller, the console, or their PC…? It’s because you’re immersed. I look at the reports. The level of hijacking of our attention that’s going on… I want us to reverse that. Joy in coding, joy in gaming, that’s all I want us to live in. If we can bring that back, I think the world would be a better place for it.”
This all sounds pretty promising, but words are just that – Sharma and Microsoft’s decisions going forward could wildly differ. In my view, the early reveal of Project Helix is more reassuring and important than any of the interviews, X posts, and town halls from the new Xbox boss, recently promoted Matt Booty, and now Nadella. It shows intent to do something different, blurring the lines between PC and console. The next question for me is, what does Xbox’s future slate of games (and its collection of first party studios) look like in the Sharma era?
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