The Xbox brand has been through many highs and lows over the years, and it’s safe to say its current position is akin to a stalled rollercoaster cart so close to the ground its inhabitants can just step out and grab an ice cream cone.
Hardware sales and overall revenue have been on a steady decline for months. After cutting thousands of Xbox jobs, canceling numerous projects, and shuttering studios in 2025, Microsoft announced a buyout program for employees to leave voluntarily, a first in the company’s 51-year history. Longtime Xbox boss Phil Spencer and president Sarah Bond abruptly left the company in February, replaced by Asha Sharma, former product development lead and president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product, and a promoted Matt Booty. As it turns out, it’s Sharma who says the brand needs a full-blown “reset” during a recent interview.
“We’re long on gaming, we’re long on Xbox, we’ll keep investing, but we’ve got work to go,” Sharma tells Bloomberg Tech during a recent livestream. “You shared the numbers. We’re not in a healthy spot, so the next 100 days is going to be about resetting the business.”
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It’s unclear what this resetting of Xbox might look like, especially with Sharma’s experience in AI, and naturally she’s media-trained enough not to share anything she isn’t ready to, but she dropped the tiniest of hints in a follow-up, saying, “We need to look at how we’re investing, how we’re prioritizing, change how we operate, in order to return to growth, in order to be where the world plays.”
Where the world plays? That sounds a lot like Xbox’s existing ‘Play Anywhere’ campaign, promising to let you play and progress through various titles on Xbox consoles, PC, and handhelds without having to pay for multiple copies. I’m sure there are big plans underway behind the scenes, but from what Sharma is very deliberately sharing here, this doesn’t sound like the dramatic shakeup the word reset implies.
At another point in the interview, Sharma is asked whether Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of Activision was a good idea in hindsight, and she notably declined to give a definitive answer, citing AI as a factor that didn’t exist at the time of the acquisition.
“It was bought at a time before ChatGPT,” she says. “It was bought at a time when our strategy was predominantly on the core consoles. It was at a time when we were right in the middle of Covid. So, hard to say how to think about those decisions, but I think these are incredible assets, and we intend to continue to invest in them.”
Here are the best Xbox Series X games you can play today.
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