When big news happens there’s an inevitable rush to put it in context and explain it. One approach is to take the news at face value and begin rationalizing it. Another approach is to assume there’s some hidden logic at work and unearth whatever that is. We’ve seen both of these when it comes to Xbox’s big leadership shakeup and neither offers a completely satisfying answer to the basic question everyone’s been asking themselves a version of since Friday afternoon: what the hell?
Phil Spencer is retiring. Sure. Makes sense. He’s been at Microsoft for 38 years. God bless him. But for it to be announced on a Friday afternoon via a series of memos and weird media “exclusives?” Odd way to put a pin in the career of one of gaming’s longest-serving and most visible executives. Not even an Official Xbox Podcast episode to break the news and offer Spencer the chance to share it in a more personal way with the millions of fans who have been following his vision for Xbox and gaming for over a decade now.
A report from The Verge explains some of this weirdness. The announcement was originally supposed to happen on Monday February 23 instead, but reporting from IGN forced Microsoft to move up its timeline. Most employees learned about the move from social media first as a result. Spencer has reportedly been planning to retire for almost a year now. Microsoft just happened to choose the end of February to pull the rip cord. Microsoft head of comms Frank Shaw shut down rumors last July that Spencer was retiring “anytime soon,” calling them made-up. Was he lying then, or now?
A celebration cut short
All the stranger considering Spencer will technically still be hanging around in an advisory role through the summer to help with the transition as new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma takes the reigns. Will he be teaching her how to get all the achievements in Brotato? Spencer’s public-facing role at Xbox has felt ceremonial for a while now, yet he’s bailing out before the console’s 25 year anniversary celebrations get underway?
For all its stumbles and challenges in recent years, 2026 is supposed to be a victory lap for Xbox. Game Pass’ price hike was wildly unpopular but its been on a tear of great releases. Xbox console sales are tanking but people are intrigued by the PC gaming future that devices like the Xbox Ally X are pointing to. And the games, a perennial Achilles’ heel for the tech giant, are here. Forza Horizon 6, Gears of War: E-Day, the Halo: Combat Evolved remake, and Fable are making good on the company’s promise of quarterly tentpoles. They’re not exclusive, but they’re each a celebration of franchises that have defined Xbox across four console generations.
Phil Spencer tries to explain Indiana Jones coming to PS5 so soon after Xbox.
“We run a business, it’s definitely true inside of Microsoft the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery we have to give back to the company” pic.twitter.com/U9z5MWxxAe
— AmericanTruckSongs9 (@ethangach) August 21, 2024
Then there’s the curious case of why Xbox president Sarah Bond resigned on Friday. Spencer’s goodbye email was the only one to mention her. Even Xbox’s long-time third musketeer Matt Booty declined to thank her for her service to the company and the platform. Hours after the news was out, Bond shared her statement on LinkedIn. She didn’t mention Booty either.
“This moment also presents a unique opportunity for fresh eyes and new leadership to guide the team into its next chapter,” she wrote. “I’ve had the privilege of spending time with Asha over the last few weeks as we’ve planned for this transition, and I’ve seen firsthand her deep commitment to our players, developers, and brand.”
A convenient scapegoat
The Verge reports that Bond was seen as “tough to work with” and that some employees were “relieved that Bond is leaving Microsoft.” Curiously, it lays much of the blame for Xbox’s recent strategic blunders at the feet of Xbox’s most junior leader. “Bond had tried to push mobile and cloud over console, to reach potentially millions more Xbox customers, but the result has been a classic case of chasing tomorrow’s customers by neglecting today’s,” writes Tom Warren, though he later notes that Bond’s actions were “under Spencer’s direction.”
I think you’d be hard pressed to find an Xbox fan anywhere who believes even for a minute that Microsoft’s multiplatform “play anywhere” pivot to cloud, PC, and mobile was a bottom-up movement spearheaded by Bond rather than a mandate incentivized from the top down as CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood demanded aggressive growth targets and strict profit margin discipline following the $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Many have noticed how convenient it would be for Microsoft to pin the erosion of Xbox as a meaningful concept on someone who’s no longer at the company and her retiring boss.
Xbox president Sarah Bond responds to a question from Bloomberg’s @dinabass about why Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks was shut down. Full interview here: https://t.co/te5Trhut0Q pic.twitter.com/LGs0n9iV0t
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) May 10, 2024
It might be easier to square any of this if Microsoft’s own messaging on this moment and what it signals sounded any more coherent than the rest of the Xbox Series X/S generation. “We will recommit to our core Xbox fans and players, those who have invested with us for the past 25 years, and to the developers who build the expansive universes and experiences that are embraced by players across the world,” Sharma wrote in her introductory memo to staff and fans. She promised “a renewed commitment to Xbox starting with console which has shaped who we are.”
Then just a sentence later she continued beating the “play anywhere” drum. “Gaming now lives across devices, not within the limits of any single piece of hardware,” she wrote. “As we expand across PC, mobile, and cloud, Xbox should feel seamless, instant, and worthy of the communities we serve. We will break down barriers so developers can build once and reach players everywhere without compromise.”
A renegade spirit for the AI age
No mention of other consoles like PS5 and Switch 2. Is Microsoft ending its experiment with exclusivity? “Hear you,” Sharma told an Xbox fan over the weekend when he told her to bring back console exclusivity. The new Microsoft Gaming CEO has been saying all the right things to build trust with Xbox’s core audience, but the platform has zigged and zagged so much over the last five years that no one’s going to believe words until they’re backed up by actions, and even then what will stop Microsoft from pivoting again while gaming remains a rounding error relative to its other businesses and the emerging AI market?
Affordable hardware. Killer games. Those are the ingredients a console platform needs to thrive and flourish. Microsoft has shown time and again it’s either not committed to those two things or is unable to execute on them. Bond may have been a poor messenger for the future of Xbox, but it will take more than messaging to save Xbox. And the way this entire Xbox reorg has been rolled out suggests that even the messaging will continue to be a mess.
“I want to return to the renegade spirit that built Xbox in the first place,” Sharma wrote in her memo. One person who doesn’t believe that is an actual renegade who built the first Xbox, Seamus Blackley. “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,” he told Games Beat today. “The job of all these people is to just gently usher all of these business units into the new world of AI. That’s what you’re seeing here.”
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