Microsoft's CEO insists that Xbox, 'at its best, lifts the entire company' and that it will 'always' invest in gaming
To recap for those who've been recently resting under a cool, mossy rock, Phil Spencer has now retired from his role as CEO of Microsoft Gaming. His replacement is Asha Sharma, who joined Microsoft in 2024—as president of its CoreAI product. This has resulted in a wave of doomsaying for Xbox that leadership has since been keen to dispel.
But besides Sharma herself recently assuring that the gaming division won't "chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company will "always" invest in gaming during a recent internal Q&A.
Sharma hosted the session in which, according to a transcript verified by Windows Central, the pair discussed their long-term vision for gaming at Microsoft.
Nadella said that Xbox "at its best lifts the entire company." He also said, "The trickle from that excellence to the rest of the company becomes straightforward. I joke with [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang, if it wasn't for gaming, [Nvidia] wouldn't exist. Think about it, without DirectX, I don't think the entire GPU revolution, or the acceleration, would've happened."
"That's why I'm long on it. Phil, 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 goes on to elaborate, "This doesn't mean we walk away from what people are doing today—when we think about a AAA game on a console. The question is about where else can we go to extend that?"
He adds, "For me, we're long on gaming. We'll continue to invest, and we'll always do so."
As for Sharma, she reflected on her time among Xbox's various teams, saying that games can't always be "manufactured" like software, but instead need to be "crafted" by humans. She also said, "I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how I can empower these worlds, these stories, and these characters."
Sharma also shared that, as far as Xbox's current strategy is concerned, "everything is being relitigated."
Nadella then jumped in to add, "We have to make sure that the friends we have today, are the friends that you have tomorrow. 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."
In other words, Xbox isn't going anywhere—but it's not looking to reinvent the green spokes of its wheel either. Reassurance that there is a long-term strategy for Microsoft Gaming is one thing, but concrete details of that strategy would very well have been another. Though, given the fact leadership is still in a transitional phase with all things Xbox still being 'relitigated,' perhaps some vagueness is to be expected.
But speaking of 'the more things change, the more they stay the same', Microsoft remains committed to releasing fresh hardware at some point in the future—despite a less-than-strong showing from the console side of things in recent years. Project Helix, the next-generation console, was just announced. However, beyond the codename, logo, and that it will "play your Xbox and PC games," information is thin on the ground.