Microsoft has shaken up its Xbox division with departures of Phil Spencer and Sara Bond, with the current president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product, Asha Sharma, taking over as Microsoft Gaming CEO, and current Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty being promoted to chief content officer. There has been a lot of discussion over what this may mean for the brand and one notable name fears the worst.
In a recent interview with Gamesbeat, original Xbox co-founder and console designer Seamus Blackley stated that Xbox will be “sunsetted” under its new CEO.
“Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business, is being sunsetted,”[…]”They don’t say that, but that’s what’s happening. I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night” “It would have been shocking if they had somebody in there in a meaningful role who was passionate about games, passionate about the creator-driven business of games, because it would be in direct conflict with everything else Microsoft is doing” “Microsoft is a company that is now about enabling its customers by enabling AI to drive things,” Blackley reiterated. “That’s at odds with the auteur model of any art, but specifically of games.”
Whether or not this is true, this is bound to be a trying time for Xbox.