While there have been quite a few doubts about Microsoft Gaming now being headed up by the company’s former President of CoreAI, Asha Sharma, in an interview with Windows Central, she has reaffirmed her commitment to Xbox. Among other things, she spoke about a “return to Xbox”, what that means for her, and how it defines her plans for the division moving forward.
“For me, the spirit of ‘Return to Xbox’ is about returning to the spirit that the team was founded on,” Sharma said. “It’s that spirit of surprise, it’s the spirit of building something nobody else was willing to try — I’ve heard ‘renegade,’ ‘rebellion,’ and ‘fun.’ used. That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote that.”
As for Xbox fans that might be worried about never getting a new console again or a decline in quality and quantity of games under the Xbox Game Studios banner, Sharma acknowledged their fears, and reaffirmed her commitment to consoles.
“Xbox players have thousands of dollars invested, in money and time too — it’s incredibly important for me to understand that and protect that,” she said. “I am committed to ‘returning to Xbox,’ and that starts with console, that starts with hardware. You will hear more about that soon, we’ll have some announcements coming up. You will see us collectively investing here.”
She went on to note that the company doesn’t have any plans to turn back on its multiplatform release strategies. Acknowledging fans of Xbox games that aren’t using Xbox hardware, she said, “We also know that there are a lot of players who aren’t on console or our hardware, and I want to deliver great games to them too. I need to learn more about what that can look like, what decisions were made, what we need to do going forward, and I want a little bit of time and space to do that.”
Addressing fears that Xbox fans might have of generative AI being forced on developers to make games, Sharma noted that she doesn’t want any creators at the company to “dilute their focus to chase an emerging community.” Rather, she wants to encourage a high quality of the product itself, and to serve the Xbox community at large.
“The thing that makes a community a community, is that you build for that core. What I don’t want to do is have any creator at Xbox dilute their focus to chase an emerging community,” Sharma explained. “If we want to invest in a new community, we’ll look at how to do that. But it’s really important that people stay true to their core when they’re building.”
“The thing I’ve learned when building platforms over my career, there’s kind of two things that really make a great platform — it’s the quality of the product that you deliver for the core user, and it’s the integrity of the decisions that stand behind it. There’s a big community at Xbox, and we’ll look at the right way to serve that community.”
As for her history at CoreAI affecting her work at Xbox, she noted that, while AI is a potentially useful tool, the company is still focused on drawing lines on what it will and won’t do. “I will not flood our ecosystem with slop,” she said. “We won’t have careless output, we won’t have derivative work. I deeply believe in the words that I shared previously there.”
Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty followed this up with his own statement, noting that Microsoft has not been pressuring Xbox developers to use AI in any way.
“What I hear throughout our studios: it is the people, our artists, our coders, the writers — they’re doing the creative work. In my experience, any time there’s a new technology, what happens is there’s a need for more specialists, new specialists,” he said. “It raises the bar on what the expectations are for the quality of the games.”
“We’ve got no pressure from Microsoft, there are no directives on AI coming down. Our teams are free to use any technologies that might be beneficial, whether it’s helping write code or check for bugs — things more in the production pipeline. At the end of the day as Asha said, we’re committed to art made by people. Technology is only in support of that.”
Sharma’s appointment as the new head of Microsoft Gaming comes in light of former head Phil Spencer retiring, and the departure of Xbox president Sarah Bond. Recent rumors have indicated that Bond faced scrutiny over the failure of the “This is an Xbox” campaign.
