Key information
Xbox leadership changed roughly 8 months ago, bringing a new regime to address years of brand decline. While Phil Spencer's era focused on expansion, the current leadership under Asha Sharma oversees a necessary contraction to correct past structural issues.
Under Spencer, internal studios enjoyed immense freedom and blank checks, resulting in endless development cycles with disparate quality control and questionable financial returns. Projects like Hellblade 2, State of Decay 3, and Fable suffered from lengthy timelines spanning up to 7 or 10 years.
Not all of Sharma's decisions are considered correct by observers, as the treatment of Id Software and the funding of Kojima's project drew criticism, alongside a strange return to exclusivity. However, the author notes that continuing under the previous trajectory was unsustainable.
Ultimately, the article asserts that a healthy business is required to sustain creative output on a large scale, arguing that the previous strategy of infinite losses was unsustainable. Microsoft representative Asha Sharma also explicitly stated that Xbox is not for sale.
