Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has described Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as having a ten-year vision that sees Xbox as critical audience for the company, as part of a wide-ranging interview with Game File that emphasised the firm’s commitment to driving Game Pass subscription revenues and investing in features for the firm’s next console, known as Project Helix.
Speaking alongside Chief Content Officer Matt Booty, Sharma said that the first time the Xbox role came up in conversation with Nadella, he told her that Microsoft was “looking out for, you know, 10 years” and that Xbox was “a very critical audience and category to the company.”
“And we have one of the most incredible brands and portfolios in entertainment,” she said. “And so he thought this would be a great opportunity for me to learn, a great opportunity for me to partner with Matt [Booty] with my consumer background. He’s obviously got a longstanding history in content and gaming. [Satya] said that this was really important to the company’s future, and so I thought that was an incredible experience.”
Sharma said that she and Booty wanted to see the Xbox division “return to growth next year, and so we’ve got work to do.” “There’s no silver bullets,” she said, “and our focus is going to be: how many players are playing every single day in the Xbox ecosystem?” The statement follows the public announcement of an updated mission statement for the Xbox division – now rebranded from Microsoft Gaming – which said the division’s “new north star” will be daily active players.
“Historically, our pricing hasn’t been as flexible, and I think that’s the big thing we want to go work on”
Sharma also reaffirmed a pledge to make Xbox “affordable.” “I think that there’s a lot of different people around the world that have different needs,” she said. “I think, historically, our pricing hasn’t been as flexible, and I think that’s the big thing we want to go work on. You saw that with Game Pass. It had become too expensive. So we took a step to address that.”
“I want to continue to make sure, as we build hardware, software, services, we’re spending just as much time on performance and play time as we are on making sure that we can innovate to offer more affordable devices and hardware and services. And so, look, there’s a reality to the market that we’re in, so there’s no promises around what the price points are or anything like that. But I want to make sure that people around the world are able to play.”
Booty said that the company’s pledge to respond to a changing gaming market required them to “think about how the expectations have changed around how social games are, around the approachability, how easy they are to get into, about the balance between satisfying the core that wants really sweaty, hard games, but making sure we don’t lock people out that want to join for the first time.”
“I think player habits, competition for attention, expectations about where and how they play, these are all changing”, he said, “And we’re putting a lot of energy across our teams into really understanding and delivering what players want.”
