All the Phil Spencer haters get to rejoice that he is gone. But now he is replaced by a woman who has only ever had AI related positions at Microsoft, and previously worked at Meta.
Also as far as I know, unlike the
of a certain studio who ruined WoW and CoD and more, he wasn’t mentioned recently on a certain set of files that were made public recently.
I know it’s not exactly a high bar, but Phil actually seemed like someone who cared about gaming in general, but he probably also didn’t get to be in charge by pushing back and sticking his neck out to save everybody else whenever it came to making the Xbox division as profitable as the suits above him demanded.
Whoever is next will be likely switching from a shovel to an excavator to dig the Xbox brand’s grave.
Like, seriously. The guy was in charge for 10 years. He did jack shit, and none of his first party studios managed to create something worth under his leadership.
A few years after shutting down Lionhead, he and Bond talked about “learning from past mistakes” so that it wouldn’t happen again. Years later, he shuts down Tango (the day before Matt Booty praised their game as something Xbox needs more of), Toys for Bob (and then, when they buy back their independence, contracts them for an Xbox game, because what is consistency?), Turn 10 (now a support studio), Arcane Austin. Rare spent half a decade working on a game that never got past its pre-production phase. He hyped Coalition as the “world’s first AAAA studio”, then unceremoniously shut it down with nothing to show for it despite working for 7 years and with outside help on one game.
343 was mismanaged for years and he never did anything to fix that, either. Of course that bit him in the ass when he bet everything on Halo Infinite, the only first party game to launch alongside the Series X, which was eventually delayed a year later. An entire year without first party games for their console. (Yes, Covid was bad for everyone in the industry, but their competition was able to release games in that timeframe). He then hoped for Starfield to save the day, which obviously didn’t happen, and by then everyone’s patience was over. 80 billion dollars down the drain for what? If I was anyone in a position of power at Microsoft, I would be pissed too.
He spent a decade pushing for GamePass and Xcloud, but never marketed it outside of niche audiences. I live in Italy and I’ve never, ever seen an Xbox ad in the past ten years. I can assure you none of my “normie” friends and family know what the current Xbox is called, let alone what the fuck GamePass is. The shit is so bad, my brother thought Cyberpunk 2077, a game that premiered on an Xbox E3 and that Microsoft had exclusive marketing rights for, was a PS exclusive. Could you believe that? Heck, everyone I talk to is surprised to hear that the Xbox One and Series offer retrocompatibility for OG Xbox and X360 games because, guess what, they never ran ads for that, either.
So many things went wrong with Xbox under his leadership, you could probably convince me he was working undercover for the competition to tank the brand. I honestly fail to think of one thing he did that worked. Like, I could go on for days. Heck, I’ll do one more: he spent the last few years attempting to merge the Xbox, PC and mobile audiences, yet using the Xbox store on PC is still a miserable experience that makes you wish you were using any other storefront. Ten years! He couldn’t find the time to fix that? Did he forget? Did he even care in the first place?
Spencer did jack shit for Xbox. The guy made promises every year, every year delivered nothing but lies, corporate bullshit and “how do you do, fellow gamers?” moments.
If anything Phil deserves his own company. If he made the call I’m sure many he got to know at Xbox and Microsoft would answer the call and make a new company with him
Hoping he would especially one like Valve. But it all depends on if he would be up for that and if everyone asked him to to show he would have huge support from day one
They’re gonna fuck up Forza Horizon 6 and Fable, aren’t they? I was cautiosly optimistic about those two under Phil, but I’m pretty sure they’re doomed now
Crazy how Microsoft spent the GDP of a decent sized country on acquiring game developers to bolster Xbox, then gave that strategy about 25 months to actually work before deciding “nevermind, pivot to AI then sell it for parts.”
They really fucked up on their marketing by saying everything is an Xbox. Confusing non-gamers, annoying real gamers, and disappointing aspiring gamers.
I wonder if the incoherent Xbox names hurt them too. I’m not into Xbox, but I couldn’t tell you what is the latest model, or which model follows which. This is a barrier for entry to the ecosystem.
I’d be surprised if Xbox is a thing in 5 years after this news. The way things are right now Microsoft can’t make an Xbox console that will succeed by any metric. Maybe it’ll stick around as software.
Phil had to salvage the brand after the fucking disaster that was Xbox One and I don’t think he was terrible but it clearly wasn’t working out.
Replacing him with the head of Core AI is a fucking joke though.
With the cost of hardware skyrocketing and Sony closing studios gaming is in a really dark place right now.
I see it as a good thing, maybe another videogame market crash is exactly what we need so they’ll understand that not every game needs to have an overblown budget, bloated content, micro transactions, massive player retention, sell a billion copies and win awards to be a good game, it’s about time videogames are recognized as being pieces of art first and products second
It’s in a dark place because it is going to eventually become unaffordable to those who haven’t purchased a console or pc or handheld yet due to the ram shortage. I guess mobile gaming will become the main focus like it is in China.
In fact, such regulations really need to go a lot further and make illegal straight up unnecessary subscriptions, too. If something doesn’t need actively maintained things outside of the actual product for it to function, then it doesn’t ‘need’ a subscription model.
Xbox is just going to be a brand/publisher I reckon.
There’ll be ‘Xbox verified’ console PCs or somesuch that aren’t necessarily made by Microsoft, and there’ll be the Xbox app for games and streaming, and Xbox published games.
And then another 5-10 years later they’ll phase that out and just be ‘Microsoft Gaming’ or somesuch branded, and the last traces of Xbox will be gone.
It’s already just a brand, Xbox is just their gaming brand. Xbox Game Pass isn’t limited to Xbox hardware. The first Xbox branded computers not made by Microsoft are already available (Asus ROG Xbox Ally). The real question is how long will Microsoft make hardware under the Xbox brand.
I wonder if this is a huge demotion for the AI guy. AI teams in Microsoft are “good” right now, I wonder if he fucked up in some way and they put him on xbox.
Yeah I don’t know. The knee jerk reaction Is “hey make Xbox have more AI”. She at least has the sense to have her first press release say “we’ll have no AI slop in our games” but we’ll see if that lasts.
The thing about that press release is that it fairly cleverly doesn’t say “no AI.” It says no slop. She’ll push AI, it’ll create slop (as always), but she’ll argue it isn’t slop and is actually great.
The term „AI art“ irks me, IMO it tries to legitimize the virtual theft that it’s based on by implying there‘s a creative, artistic process behind it. It‘s gotta be a lobbied term.
A silver lining is that the NVIDIA/OpenAI deal was cut by ~70% this week, so hopefully the reality of AI not being a panacea sets in for those who have been driving the prices up. If the planned data centers never actually get built, production will shift back and consumer pricing should adjust accordingly. The MBA class will keep trying to manipulate it artificially of course, but they’ll only be able to keep the ruse this far from reality for so long.
Microslop is making a number of baffling choices that were influenced by huffing the farts of Satya and other AI fools. Asha Sharma is in no way capable of running Xbox anywhere but into the ground (not like she’ll have to do much, given the state of Xbox). Phil Spencer retiring from Microslop is probably a move he made knowing they are going to continue their downward spiral. Sarah Bond resigning from her position is a curious one. I wonder if Microslop execs talked future plans for Xbox with her, and felt so stunned by their incompetence, Sarah decided to abandon the Xbox division. There are other factors likely involved, but, I doubt we’ll be privy to those details just yet. When the postmortem of Xbox is released…The people involved might talk about, at least I hope so.
As I don’t feel Xbox as a console has a future, my current plan is to abandon Xbox as a platform. It will take time because right now buying an upgraded Gaming PC will be difficult, due to the insanity of hardware prices. For now, I’ll have to simply save my money and bide my time.
I don’t doubt Sarah was being brought up as Phils replacement, but Satya wanted an AI puppet at the helm, so Asha got inserted. Being passed over for her ascent, Sarah had no real choice than to leave.
I quit Xbox after 3 Xbox 360s got the red ring of death just after the warranty expired. I’ll never go back even though I want clockwork revolution and a couple other exclusives.
XBox will still get development as long as Microsoft wants gaming on PC on a way it can somewhat control. Part of the reason why the XBox got made was because Microsoft already developed the software required to make a console.
Yeah, ‘overmuch’ is a very useful word, great for shortening sentences! As an avid reader, I do see plenty of words…Rarely, do I use them because following KISS is for the best!
I’ll not sure Spencer had been doing a great job, but this feels incredibly abrupt and makes me wonder if Xbox’s next generation hardware plans are cancelled in favor of a software and AI approach. The new CEO being an AI suit makes me think they want to take shit it a very different direction.
Considering how the person replacing Spencer has been known from leading Microsoft’s AI division and isn’t much of a gamer, this doesn’t make Xbox’s future rosy. Dwindling sales, large layoffs and RAM prices skyrocketing… I highly doubt they can build a competitive console.
Hey don’t discount them that much, they also can’t make games either. They’re going for full on business-only approach, consumers are not a priority for them at all anymore.
It really does seem to follow the classic arc of going from marketing to consumers to B2B but like, you can’t sell games B2B can you? It’s so direct to consumer
Former AI guy’s job is to figure out how to make AI make video games, and in the meantime, figure out how to cram AI data scraping into absolutely every possible element of … whatever Xbox Live is called now.
The first will almost certainly fail, the second is much easier and will make the division more profitable untill it gets axxed after the first thing totally fails.
EDIT:
Erp, its AI gal, not AI guy.
Asha Sharma.
But… her recent LinkedIn history outside of MSFT is:
Board Member of Home Depot (ongoing)
Board Member of Coupang (ongoing)
(A Fortune 200 tech platform and South Korea’s largest e commerce company)
COO of Instacart (2021-2024)
Headed up, among other things, data science.
She was also apparently a VP at Meta/Facebook, before that.
Oh hey, I’ve done data analytics, I’ve done data science!
I’ve even also done lower level grunt work at MSFT!
Yeah I am 100% certain of the second part of my guess now.
Less certain about the first part, as she has literally no background with game development, as far as I can tell.
IMO, she is absolutely going to be put in charge of squeezing every last possible drop out of Xbox, which MSFT will most likely just transition to being basically a publisher only/primarily, given how many big IPs they own…
…and they’ll probably switch over to a new person after there’s basically nothing left to squeeze, after they’ve essentially functionally randomly fired at least 50% of the people working for the studios they now own, and essentially randomly reorganized the remainder of those people into different or new studios, see Ubisoft.
“Best” case scenario, after the AI bubble pops, she manages to figure out some kind of partner ship with either Nvidia or some remaining firm that has a bunch of AI datacenter GPUs, and then we get Xbox’s attempt at Google Stadia.
If ram goes up for everyone, Microsoft is no worse placed. There will be less sales overall, but they could take a larger piece of that pie of they were good. They won’t.
One thing that might go in their favour is pc gaming. If ram and video cards get super crazy for long enough, people might have a single PC and gaming console. The steam deck should be well placed to take advantage. Microsoft could be too, with foresight.
I was honestly surprised when we got the Series. I was pretty convinced that they were done with consoles after the One X|S and that Xbox would become more of a Steam competitor as a brand. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Series ended up being the last console.
Phil was probably the last thing keep Xbox from fully imploding. You could tell he was an actual gamer that cared about the Xbox as a games console and not whatever Frankenstein they are going to turn it into.
It’s sad but Xbox had a really good run. Xbox won’t exist beyond the next console generation, it may not even make it that far before it just becomes gamepass.
Aside from Sega I was going to toss Atari on that list but TIL they are very much still making new hardware, except it’s all targeted for retro gaming. Different focus and not a true competitor to Sony but technically still kicking.
3DO and Atari were never really competitors. They were minor players in the console market that were already considered unsuccessful by the time the PS1 was released.
Sega is one company. Sony has outlasted one competitor, which makes it odd to say “yet another”.
That’s a nice opinion but Atari and 3DO were selling consoles at the same time PS1 was out. That makes them competitive, no matter how large the margin.
Sure, Sony “outlived” two minor competitors that were already failing when the PS1 released.
Much like how I outlived actor Carey Grant, who was 80 years old when I was born. That’s definitely how I’d phrase that.
But hey, those examples were “just to name a few”, so there must be more, right?
But seriously, the way your original comment was phrased makes it sound like Sony is some kind of console war juggernaut, outlasting its many competitors over decades. The reality is that Sega folded to Sony and Nintendo back in the early aughts, and then it was 25 stable years of having three big console makers, and that’s it.
After Mattrick, they probably shouldn’t have promoted internally from the executive class that went along with the pivot of internal studios to kinect and home theater media center. They needed leadership that knew how to deliver quality games on time. Saw Sony hit its stride mid-PS3 era with the advent of the AAA narrative action adventure game and could never adjust to that. I know American company, but maybe they should have looked to Sega, Capcom, Koei Tecmo to lead Xbox game studios and someone else to lead hardware and services. Xbox was at its best when it was paying for timed exclusives in the 360 era from third parties and funding 2nd party exclusives. Their internal studio production has been weak for like 20 years. Halo, Gears, Forza Motorsport, Fable has fallen to all of them in the doldrums and Forza Horizon being their only high tier Xbox associated IP now. I’d take someone from Square Enix today to lead Xbox studios today. The last decade they’ve churned out games even though mostly not AAA, they’re mostly solid games and satisfy a lot of niches like Dragon Quest Monsters. Square Enix games are oddly experimental and creative for such a large publisher. Something Xbox sorely lacks. Master Chief is barely surviving as a console mascot and that’s practically all they have at this point. Conker and Banjo are irrelevant with how they’ve handled those IPs
I wonder how much of this is the big bet that they placed on buying up Activision Blizzard (plus other studios) and not being able to show enough growth on Gamepass?
And now of course, with skyrocketing hardware costs, and the ripple effects of tariffs before that, even putting MS’s preoccupation with cloud services and AI to one side, the console business probably isn’t the money spinner it once was.
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Spencer leaving Microsoft: Yay!
Spencer being replaced by a Marketing Exec who leads an AI division: FUUUUUUCK
Literal definition of Monkey’s Paw:
All the Phil Spencer haters get to rejoice that he is gone. But now he is replaced by a woman who has only ever had AI related positions at Microsoft, and previously worked at Meta.
Even her letter to employees sounds AI generated.
Exactly.
People forget that the Xbox game division is only a subset of Microsoft so Phil always had to answer to the bigger suits.
Phil actually made games. Phil came from a pretty cool era and I’ve seen him interviewed over the years by people who you only go talk to if you liked games.
As far as US game company execs go, Phil wasn’t the worst.
Also as far as I know, unlike the
of a certain studio who ruined WoW and CoD and more, he wasn’t mentioned recently on a certain set of files that were made public recently.
I know it’s not exactly a high bar, but Phil actually seemed like someone who cared about gaming in general, but he probably also didn’t get to be in charge by pushing back and sticking his neck out to save everybody else whenever it came to making the Xbox division as profitable as the suits above him demanded.
Whoever is next will be likely switching from a shovel to an excavator to dig the Xbox brand’s grave.
He did???
Like, seriously. The guy was in charge for 10 years. He did jack shit, and none of his first party studios managed to create something worth under his leadership.
A few years after shutting down Lionhead, he and Bond talked about “learning from past mistakes” so that it wouldn’t happen again. Years later, he shuts down Tango (the day before Matt Booty praised their game as something Xbox needs more of), Toys for Bob (and then, when they buy back their independence, contracts them for an Xbox game, because what is consistency?), Turn 10 (now a support studio), Arcane Austin. Rare spent half a decade working on a game that never got past its pre-production phase. He hyped Coalition as the “world’s first AAAA studio”, then unceremoniously shut it down with nothing to show for it despite working for 7 years and with outside help on one game.
343 was mismanaged for years and he never did anything to fix that, either. Of course that bit him in the ass when he bet everything on Halo Infinite, the only first party game to launch alongside the Series X, which was eventually delayed a year later. An entire year without first party games for their console. (Yes, Covid was bad for everyone in the industry, but their competition was able to release games in that timeframe). He then hoped for Starfield to save the day, which obviously didn’t happen, and by then everyone’s patience was over. 80 billion dollars down the drain for what? If I was anyone in a position of power at Microsoft, I would be pissed too.
He spent a decade pushing for GamePass and Xcloud, but never marketed it outside of niche audiences. I live in Italy and I’ve never, ever seen an Xbox ad in the past ten years. I can assure you none of my “normie” friends and family know what the current Xbox is called, let alone what the fuck GamePass is. The shit is so bad, my brother thought Cyberpunk 2077, a game that premiered on an Xbox E3 and that Microsoft had exclusive marketing rights for, was a PS exclusive. Could you believe that? Heck, everyone I talk to is surprised to hear that the Xbox One and Series offer retrocompatibility for OG Xbox and X360 games because, guess what, they never ran ads for that, either.
So many things went wrong with Xbox under his leadership, you could probably convince me he was working undercover for the competition to tank the brand. I honestly fail to think of one thing he did that worked. Like, I could go on for days. Heck, I’ll do one more: he spent the last few years attempting to merge the Xbox, PC and mobile audiences, yet using the Xbox store on PC is still a miserable experience that makes you wish you were using any other storefront. Ten years! He couldn’t find the time to fix that? Did he forget? Did he even care in the first place?
Spencer did jack shit for Xbox. The guy made promises every year, every year delivered nothing but lies, corporate bullshit and “how do you do, fellow gamers?” moments.
Also keep in mind, all those Blizzard people are now under Microsoft.
We need a global boycott of: WoW, Overwatch, CoD, Candy Crush, Elder Scrolls, Halo, Fable, Forza, Gears of war, etc.
Don’t forget Fallout.
If anything Phil deserves his own company. If he made the call I’m sure many he got to know at Xbox and Microsoft would answer the call and make a new company with him
Hoping he would especially one like Valve. But it all depends on if he would be up for that and if everyone asked him to to show he would have huge support from day one
Who replaced him?
Her name is in the 3rd sentence of the article posted by OP.
But, as a special treat for the lazy, her name is Asha Sharma.
So much of the Verge is paywalled these days it’s completely understandable for someone not to bother clicking through.
https://archive.ph/lDQBT
It isn’t hard to access and read an article without giving ad revenue or what-not to the site owners.
archive.today/ph is used for DDoS attacks and was caught tampering with content on its snapshots.
maybe the woman is actually AI as well
Cortana is that you?
They’re gonna fuck up Forza Horizon 6 and Fable, aren’t they? I was cautiosly optimistic about those two under Phil, but I’m pretty sure they’re doomed now
Crazy how Microsoft spent the GDP of a decent sized country on acquiring game developers to bolster Xbox, then gave that strategy about 25 months to actually work before deciding “nevermind, pivot to AI then sell it for parts.”
The CEO gets a bonus if he increases the stocks value. They dont care if its actually profitable, as long as they get paid before it fails.
They really fucked up on their marketing by saying everything is an Xbox. Confusing non-gamers, annoying real gamers, and disappointing aspiring gamers.
I wonder if the incoherent Xbox names hurt them too. I’m not into Xbox, but I couldn’t tell you what is the latest model, or which model follows which. This is a barrier for entry to the ecosystem.
“mom, I want the new Xbox for Christmas” “Youve got a tablet and a TV, the commercials say you already have 2”
For sure it did. Dumb decisions, compounded.
I’d be surprised if Xbox is a thing in 5 years after this news. The way things are right now Microsoft can’t make an Xbox console that will succeed by any metric. Maybe it’ll stick around as software.
Phil had to salvage the brand after the fucking disaster that was Xbox One and I don’t think he was terrible but it clearly wasn’t working out.
Replacing him with the head of Core AI is a fucking joke though.
With the cost of hardware skyrocketing and Sony closing studios gaming is in a really dark place right now.
I see it as a good thing, maybe another videogame market crash is exactly what we need so they’ll understand that not every game needs to have an overblown budget, bloated content, micro transactions, massive player retention, sell a billion copies and win awards to be a good game, it’s about time videogames are recognized as being pieces of art first and products second
Gaming is most definitely not in a dark place right now
Steamdeck, Gaming on Linux, indie games, Arc Raiders, skies are blue and the sun is shining my friend
Gaming is in a great place. AAA gaming is not, because of-fucking-course corpos don’t understand art.
It’s in a dark place because it is going to eventually become unaffordable to those who haven’t purchased a console or pc or handheld yet due to the ram shortage. I guess mobile gaming will become the main focus like it is in China.
Given all the fun I’ve had over the years with far less powerful systems, it’s not exactly a deathknell to gaming if it turns out that way.
It just better be the deathknell for terrible mobile game microtransaction structures and p2w schemes if mobile devices become the new norm…
My hope is the EU and China start to regulate mobile gaming for it to become less like casinos for children.
Fully agreed with that.
In fact, such regulations really need to go a lot further and make illegal straight up unnecessary subscriptions, too. If something doesn’t need actively maintained things outside of the actual product for it to function, then it doesn’t ‘need’ a subscription model.
Xbox is just going to be a brand/publisher I reckon.
There’ll be ‘Xbox verified’ console PCs or somesuch that aren’t necessarily made by Microsoft, and there’ll be the Xbox app for games and streaming, and Xbox published games.
And then another 5-10 years later they’ll phase that out and just be ‘Microsoft Gaming’ or somesuch branded, and the last traces of Xbox will be gone.
It’s already just a brand, Xbox is just their gaming brand. Xbox Game Pass isn’t limited to Xbox hardware. The first Xbox branded computers not made by Microsoft are already available (Asus ROG Xbox Ally). The real question is how long will Microsoft make hardware under the Xbox brand.
I wonder if this is a huge demotion for the AI guy. AI teams in Microsoft are “good” right now, I wonder if he fucked up in some way and they put him on xbox.
Yeah I don’t know. The knee jerk reaction Is “hey make Xbox have more AI”. She at least has the sense to have her first press release say “we’ll have no AI slop in our games” but we’ll see if that lasts.
CoD has been caught using AI art already.
The thing about that press release is that it fairly cleverly doesn’t say “no AI.” It says no slop. She’ll push AI, it’ll create slop (as always), but she’ll argue it isn’t slop and is actually great.
The term „AI art“ irks me, IMO it tries to legitimize the virtual theft that it’s based on by implying there‘s a creative, artistic process behind it. It‘s gotta be a lobbied term.
Yeah thats fair. Slop is more appropriate.
COD hasn’t been worth playing in ~12 years.
A silver lining is that the NVIDIA/OpenAI deal was cut by ~70% this week, so hopefully the reality of AI not being a panacea sets in for those who have been driving the prices up. If the planned data centers never actually get built, production will shift back and consumer pricing should adjust accordingly. The MBA class will keep trying to manipulate it artificially of course, but they’ll only be able to keep the ruse this far from reality for so long.
It’s not all bad. AI can make some great creative games with lots of soul. There will be hundreds.
This has to be sarcasm.
Please add /s if you’re being sarcastic because otherwise you just look like a fool.
That’s an obvious joke.
You’d hope, but it’s 2026 and there are some people who fucking date AIs. And fuck them.
Soooooo yeahhhhh, clarification would be appreciated.
@[email protected] do you date ais?
Depends, who’s asking and what AI model are you based on? Pics.
Damn I was really banking on a “no” for the argument
Come on man, don’t be that guy. You’re better than that.
I mean the question got an answer, so either feeding the trolls, or popcorn moment.
… Either way I’ve got my popcorn.
This is deffo bait.
Microslop is making a number of baffling choices that were influenced by huffing the farts of Satya and other AI fools. Asha Sharma is in no way capable of running Xbox anywhere but into the ground (not like she’ll have to do much, given the state of Xbox). Phil Spencer retiring from Microslop is probably a move he made knowing they are going to continue their downward spiral. Sarah Bond resigning from her position is a curious one. I wonder if Microslop execs talked future plans for Xbox with her, and felt so stunned by their incompetence, Sarah decided to abandon the Xbox division. There are other factors likely involved, but, I doubt we’ll be privy to those details just yet. When the postmortem of Xbox is released…The people involved might talk about, at least I hope so.
As I don’t feel Xbox as a console has a future, my current plan is to abandon Xbox as a platform. It will take time because right now buying an upgraded Gaming PC will be difficult, due to the insanity of hardware prices. For now, I’ll have to simply save my money and bide my time.
I don’t doubt Sarah was being brought up as Phils replacement, but Satya wanted an AI puppet at the helm, so Asha got inserted. Being passed over for her ascent, Sarah had no real choice than to leave.
I quit Xbox after 3 Xbox 360s got the red ring of death just after the warranty expired. I’ll never go back even though I want clockwork revolution and a couple other exclusives.
XBox will still get development as long as Microsoft wants gaming on PC on a way it can somewhat control. Part of the reason why the XBox got made was because Microsoft already developed the software required to make a console.
What the fuck is “overmuch”?
I edited that to: “not like she’ll have to do much, given the state of Xbox”. I was typing faster than my brain could think…It’s been a day.
Haha gotcha. I actually searched it up and overmuch is a word. Hadn’t heard that one before.
Yeah, ‘overmuch’ is a very useful word, great for shortening sentences! As an avid reader, I do see plenty of words…Rarely, do I use them because following KISS is for the best!
I’ll not sure Spencer had been doing a great job, but this feels incredibly abrupt and makes me wonder if Xbox’s next generation hardware plans are cancelled in favor of a software and AI approach. The new CEO being an AI suit makes me think they want to take shit it a very different direction.
Considering how the person replacing Spencer has been known from leading Microsoft’s AI division and isn’t much of a gamer, this doesn’t make Xbox’s future rosy. Dwindling sales, large layoffs and RAM prices skyrocketing… I highly doubt they can build a competitive console.
Hey don’t discount them that much, they also can’t make games either. They’re going for full on business-only approach, consumers are not a priority for them at all anymore.
You can sell consoles with advertisement and marketing. The product is a secondary concern.
And with AI + bunch of privately owned mass media, you can saturate the brains of the next generation of gamers with endless targeted ads.
Fully expect Discord to begin vomiting ad spam into random chat streams like Reddit channels are getting bombarded with Crypto Casino promotions.
It really does seem to follow the classic arc of going from marketing to consumers to B2B but like, you can’t sell games B2B can you? It’s so direct to consumer
Because we don’t have any fucking money
My guess?
Former AI guy’s job is to figure out how to make AI make video games, and in the meantime, figure out how to cram AI data scraping into absolutely every possible element of … whatever Xbox Live is called now.
The first will almost certainly fail, the second is much easier and will make the division more profitable untill it gets axxed after the first thing totally fails.
EDIT:
Erp, its AI gal, not AI guy.
Asha Sharma.
But… her recent LinkedIn history outside of MSFT is:
Board Member of Home Depot (ongoing)
Board Member of Coupang (ongoing)
(A Fortune 200 tech platform and South Korea’s largest e commerce company)
COO of Instacart (2021-2024)
Headed up, among other things, data science.
She was also apparently a VP at Meta/Facebook, before that.
Oh hey, I’ve done data analytics, I’ve done data science!
I’ve even also done lower level grunt work at MSFT!
Yeah I am 100% certain of the second part of my guess now.
Less certain about the first part, as she has literally no background with game development, as far as I can tell.
IMO, she is absolutely going to be put in charge of squeezing every last possible drop out of Xbox, which MSFT will most likely just transition to being basically a publisher only/primarily, given how many big IPs they own…
…and they’ll probably switch over to a new person after there’s basically nothing left to squeeze, after they’ve essentially functionally randomly fired at least 50% of the people working for the studios they now own, and essentially randomly reorganized the remainder of those people into different or new studios, see Ubisoft.
“Best” case scenario, after the AI bubble pops, she manages to figure out some kind of partner ship with either Nvidia or some remaining firm that has a bunch of AI datacenter GPUs, and then we get Xbox’s attempt at Google Stadia.
If ram goes up for everyone, Microsoft is no worse placed. There will be less sales overall, but they could take a larger piece of that pie of they were good. They won’t.
One thing that might go in their favour is pc gaming. If ram and video cards get super crazy for long enough, people might have a single PC and gaming console. The steam deck should be well placed to take advantage. Microsoft could be too, with foresight.
“with foresight”
My brother in christ, they put an “AI” shithead in charge. They practically by definition cannot have foresight.
Haha, yes. But they could. They just won’t.
I was honestly surprised when we got the Series. I was pretty convinced that they were done with consoles after the One X|S and that Xbox would become more of a Steam competitor as a brand. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Series ended up being the last console.
They are already tending towards “Everything is an Xbox”.
Now that you will own nothing because of AI. This is fantastic for them
I would leave a flaming wreck too.
Microsoft needs to have a sit down with Sega on how to become a decent 3rd party developer.
Phil was probably the last thing keep Xbox from fully imploding. You could tell he was an actual gamer that cared about the Xbox as a games console and not whatever Frankenstein they are going to turn it into.
It’s sad but Xbox had a really good run. Xbox won’t exist beyond the next console generation, it may not even make it that far before it just becomes gamepass.
Yeah, I’m glad I’m not alone in having that vibe about Phil.
PlayStation outlives yet another competitor.
Another?
Aside from Sega I was going to toss Atari on that list but TIL they are very much still making new hardware, except it’s all targeted for retro gaming. Different focus and not a true competitor to Sony but technically still kicking.
Sega Saturn and Dreamcast, 3DO, Atari Jaguar just to name a few. Soon will be adding Microsoft’s XBOX to the list.
3DO and Atari were never really competitors. They were minor players in the console market that were already considered unsuccessful by the time the PS1 was released.
Sega is one company. Sony has outlasted one competitor, which makes it odd to say “yet another”.
That’s a nice opinion but Atari and 3DO were selling consoles at the same time PS1 was out. That makes them competitive, no matter how large the margin.
Sure, Sony “outlived” two minor competitors that were already failing when the PS1 released.
Much like how I outlived actor Carey Grant, who was 80 years old when I was born. That’s definitely how I’d phrase that.
But hey, those examples were “just to name a few”, so there must be more, right?
But seriously, the way your original comment was phrased makes it sound like Sony is some kind of console war juggernaut, outlasting its many competitors over decades. The reality is that Sega folded to Sony and Nintendo back in the early aughts, and then it was 25 stable years of having three big console makers, and that’s it.
That’s all I’m saying.
SEGA? A bit ancient history by now I guess
Sega, I guess?
I was going to say “good riddance”, but considering that his replacement is a former AI exec… Lol.
To be fair, I don’t envy anyone who is put in charge of the mess that is Xbox right now.
After Mattrick, they probably shouldn’t have promoted internally from the executive class that went along with the pivot of internal studios to kinect and home theater media center. They needed leadership that knew how to deliver quality games on time. Saw Sony hit its stride mid-PS3 era with the advent of the AAA narrative action adventure game and could never adjust to that. I know American company, but maybe they should have looked to Sega, Capcom, Koei Tecmo to lead Xbox game studios and someone else to lead hardware and services. Xbox was at its best when it was paying for timed exclusives in the 360 era from third parties and funding 2nd party exclusives. Their internal studio production has been weak for like 20 years. Halo, Gears, Forza Motorsport, Fable has fallen to all of them in the doldrums and Forza Horizon being their only high tier Xbox associated IP now. I’d take someone from Square Enix today to lead Xbox studios today. The last decade they’ve churned out games even though mostly not AAA, they’re mostly solid games and satisfy a lot of niches like Dragon Quest Monsters. Square Enix games are oddly experimental and creative for such a large publisher. Something Xbox sorely lacks. Master Chief is barely surviving as a console mascot and that’s practically all they have at this point. Conker and Banjo are irrelevant with how they’ve handled those IPs
I wonder how much of this is the big bet that they placed on buying up Activision Blizzard (plus other studios) and not being able to show enough growth on Gamepass?
And now of course, with skyrocketing hardware costs, and the ripple effects of tariffs before that, even putting MS’s preoccupation with cloud services and AI to one side, the console business probably isn’t the money spinner it once was.
This could be good for gaming if it’s the death knell of subscription ‘ownership’.