As Xbox prepares for its biggest gaming showcase in years, new CEO Asha Sharma shared a debrief with Bloomberg Tech 2026 about her first 100 days with Microsoft’s gaming division and where she plans to take it over the next 100. “I felt like my first job as CEO of Xbox was just to understand the soul of Xbox,” she said. What is the soul of Xbox according to Sharma?
That’s the question fans have been wondering about since the unexpected pick to succeed Phil Spencer was announced earlier this year. One thing we do know about Xbox is that the hardware its soul is incased in is getting way more expensive. “With AI, memory and storage costs are going up 2.75 times rather than 50 percent down,” she said.
Later in the interview Sharma added that the company “invest[s] in subsidies even when we’re losing money because of memory and storage,” suggesting the $400 Xbox Series S ($300 at launch) and $650 Xbox Series X ($500 at launch) are still losing money. She said her next 100 days will be about finding a way to make Project Helix, Microsoft’s next-gen gaming console, affordable despite the current market conditions. “I think it’s expensive if we do not innovate and I came to help with that problem,” she said.
How to make Project Helix affordable
As for whether the Xbox business will revolve around this new console by the year 2030, Sharma was less committal. “We’re certainly going to continue to put out great reference experiences,” she said, but explained that while console will remain core to what Xbox is, the platform will also “push out” into new spaces, including PC and mobile. Asked whether gaming handhelds might be a part of that, Sharma stopped short of confirming the company would ever produce its own rather that just sticking to licensing deals like the Rog Xbox Ally.
How much latitude does Sharma have when it comes to making those types of calls? She said in the interview that it was her decision to kill the Xbox Copilot initiative, despite her boss, CEO Satya Nadella, previously saying that Microsoft was a Copilot company. Pressed about Bloomberg‘s reporting that Xbox game studios were being held to unsustainable 30-percent profit margins, Sharma said that wasn’t a restriction being placed on her.
“My mandate is not 30-percent accountability margins,” she said. “It’s not enterprise software margins. It’s to be the number one gaming and entertainment company. And that’s what we’re going to go to do.” Contrary to speculation that the software company was looking to strangle its gaming division for quick revenue, Sharma said Microsoft remains “long on Xbox,” as evidenced by all of its recent investments in acquisitions and the hardware ecosystem.
That said, Sharma also admitted that Xbox is “not in a healthy spot” right now and promised her next hundred days “is going to be about resetting the business.” She also distanced herself from the expensive Activision Blizzard deal, which was supposed to be the crowning achievement of her predecessors’ tenures.
“It was bought at a time before ChatGPT, was bought at a time before our strategy, when our strategy was predominantly on the core consoles,” Sharma said. “It was at a time when, you know, we were right in the middle of covid. So hard to say how to think about those decisions. But I think these are incredible assets and we intend to continue to invest in them.”
Platforms need exclusives
She continued, “At the same time, we’re increasingly becoming a platform. In order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services. And so we’re looking at that very closely. I think that we have to be very thoughtful about each title and how we want to think about it and learn from similar cases in the industry.”
That certainly sounds at the very least like Xbox won’t be pulling its biggest games completely off of rival platforms anytime soon. Instead, Sharma might still be searching for a third way that pleases, if not everyone, then at least most of the people who Xbox wants to reach in the future. Maybe some games are day-and-date on PS5, others are timed exclusives for Xbox and PC, and a smaller group of core games never come to Sony or Nintendo platforms. This weekend’s Xbox gaming showcase should offer a clue.
