The future of Xbox is vague and contradictory, with just a glimmer of hope

So Phil Spencer is gone. So too is Sarah Bond who, per some reports, had as much if not more influence over strategy than Spencer in recent years. Up comes Matt Booty, who was already part of the main leadership trio and is now chief content officer, broadly overseeing Xbox's internal studios and the games they make. And in comes Asha Sharma.

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The future of Xbox is vague and contradictory, with just a glimmer of hope

Boss battles.

[Asha Sharma and Matt Booty sit together smiling in casual clothes, in front of the infamous 'this is an Xbox' marketing posters faded in the background]

Image credit: Microsoft / Eurogamer

Opinion

by Chris Tapsell
Deputy Editorial Director

Published on Feb. 24, 2026

133 comments

So Phil Spencer is gone. So too is Sarah Bond who, per some reports, had as much if not more influence over strategy than Spencer in recent years. Up comes Matt Booty, who was already part of the main leadership trio and is now chief content officer, broadly overseeing Xbox's internal studios and the games they make. And in comes Asha Sharma.

Sharma, now the executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft Gaming - essentially the new Spencer and Bond combined - seems a peculiar character. Not a household name to gamers, or really anyone outside the business world, much has already been made of the fact her background lies outside of video games altogether, having previously worked at Instacart and Meta, before moving into AI at Microsoft. And much too about that background in AI.

For many that's two alarm bells already ringing. (This writer's take, for what it's worth, is that you needn't be a gamer to be a gaming CEO, but you do have to get it, whatever getting it ultimately means. Friend of Eurogamer Chris Dring has pointed to 2K's Strauss Zelnick as one non-gamer example there, which seems wise. I'd personally look at Sharma's initial interactions on X, including with one person currently locked in a legal battle over alleged repeat harassment of a journalist, as a reason to at least raise one very large eyebrow. And look at original Xbox creator Seamus Blackley's quotes, in a rare interview, about how many others have promised him they'll "figure it out" in video games only to fail. And also generally the less said about gen-AI the better).

And then there's the comments Sharma made on a podcast last year which instantly began to circulate after her arrival at Xbox, where she talks about how AI can help with, of all things, birth rates, and which have seen her labelled a natalist and worse. (The very short summary of this already very odd sidebar is that, on the one hand, natalist views and excessive fixations on birth rates have become a central pillar of the modern far right, especially those in the world of tech, and also that talking about birth rates out loud is always at the very least a bit weird; on the other, Sharma, still an AI executive at the time, was in the middle of citing all the wonderful ways ChatGPT and AI as a whole can help with everything, in healthcare and beyond - many asterisks required - and is at least as likely to be generally pumping up the AI hype balloon here as she is to be revealing personal beliefs of anything more sinister).

Either way, her appointment has not exactly sparked joyous celebrations in the streets of Xbox land - and it comes alongside yet more corporate intrigue as well. A report from the Verge, citing anonymous senior sources within the company, throws Sarah Bond well and truly under the bus, placing the infamous "This is an Xbox" marketing campaign at her feet, intimating that she was the driving force behind much of Xbox's recent strategy while Spencer was occupied with the Activision Blizzard merger, and describing her as "tough to work with".

But one important twist here is that this narrative bears a lot of the hallmarks of a classic "glass cliff", where women, especially women of colour, break through the glass ceiling of the corporate world only to be stitched up with a role of impossible responsibility - and all the blame for failure. Football fans here in the UK might also recognise a bit of classic upper brass arse-covering after a big leadership change - in the vein of briefing an 'inside story' after a top club's manager is sacked that details, say, all the many reasons the players didn't like their training methods, or the cruel banning of canteen ketchup.

This is not to say this reporting can't be entirely true - it may well be; the Verge is mostly reliable on Microsoft - only that some reading between the lines is often required. It's notable, for instance, that the only evidence given for Bond being "tough to work with" is in that she "built a team structure that meant if you didn't follow the vision or questioned it, you were out" - which while cutthroat, also sounds an awful lot like how most big vision corporate leaders tend to operate. (Another curious observation: Microsoft's blog announcing the change, made in haste as IGN looked to break the story, featured the internal messages of Spencer, Sharma, Booty, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella - but no inclusion of Bond, who instead shared her own internal memo on LinkedIn.)

What this does signify, with some certainty, is that the task of managing Xbox is not a smooth one. Even putting the corporate politics aside there's the fact the platform now finds itself in a number of Catch-22 dilemmas. Sharma's own blog post-née-internal-memo is a perfect example. In it she makes three key commitments which, in the absence of any other public manifesto, will serve as the main yardstick of her success for now, and the main means by which the gaming public sizes her up.

The first is "great games" - strong start - where she rightly says Xbox "must have great games beloved by players before we do anything", correctly identifying this as perhaps the most terminal of Xbox's ongoing issues, at least until the brute force solution of acquiring Zenimax and Activision Blizzard King. She then goes on to cite this as her reasoning for promoting Matt Booty, who has overseen years of projects stuck in development hell, infinite reboot cycles, waves of cancellations, and the shuttering of numerous once-prestigious studios. (And who was also the unfortunate face of corporate creativity-harpooning in the DoubleFine documentary, where he's filmed informing eager developers that all their fun side project ideas will be the intellectual property of Microsoft going forward, at which point we see the light seem to drain from those developers' eyes in real time).

[Corporate photo of Asha Sharma, Xbox CEO, wearing a moss green shirt and smiling widely while looking to the side of the camera, in a grey office.]

Asha Sharma, the new executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft Gaming. | Image credit: Microsoft

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