GoKawiilMicrosoft’s new Xbox chief has had a busy couple of months after promising “the return of Xbox.” Asha Sharma met with publishers at the Game Developers Conference in March, and has also been on the road visiting Microsoft’s own game studios and product teams in recent weeks. Sharma, who used to work in Microsoft’s CoreAI division, is very much in learning mode and talking to as many people as she can before she makes strategic decisions on the future of Xbox.
Some of those decisions are about to be made very soon.
Sources at Xbox tell me Sharma has been looking closely at Game Pass pricing recently, with a view to offering a wider range of pricing models. Sharma admitted that “Game Pass has become too expensive for players,” in an internal memo sent earlier this week.
“Game Pass is central to gaming value on Xbox. It’s also clear that the current model isn’t the final one. Player behavior, content economics, and markets vary too much for a single approach to work everywhere,” said Sharma. “Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players, so we need a better value equation. Long term, we will evolve Game Pass into a more flexible system which will take time to test and learn around.”
I understand one potential option under consideration is a Game Pass subscription tier that only includes games from Microsoft’s own Xbox studios. This would fall under the more flexible system that Sharma hints at. Bundles could also help here. I reported in February that Microsoft is looking at ways to bundle third-party services with Game Pass subscriptions. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters told The Information last month that he and Sharma had “kicked around ideas” for partnering on subscription bundles.
While new Game Pass bundles could help grow subscription numbers and revenue in the future, Sharma is also promising to address the “value equation” of Game Pass. Rumors have suggested Microsoft could remove Call of Duty from Game Pass to help with subscription costs, but it’s unlikely that the company would remove existing games from subscribers. One potential option Microsoft is considering is not adding future Call of Duty titles to Game Pass. The debate over Call of Duty in Game Pass has been an intense one internally at Xbox for years, so Sharma will face a tough decision here that could expose some of the core issues of Microsoft’s previous Xbox strategy.
Speaking of previous strategies, Sharma also quickly reversed Microsoft’s “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign last month. I’m told the ads were deeply unpopular inside of Xbox, and outside of the company, hardcore fans hated them too. “Asha retired ‘This is an Xbox’ because it didn’t feel like Xbox,” said an unnamed Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to Windows Central. “She is personally leading a reset of how we show up as a brand.”
Despite the marketing efforts and expansion to cloud and PC, how Xbox shows up as a brand is still predominantly through console hardware. In recent weeks, Sharma has switched the focus back to console. She instructed Xbox engineering teams to work on highly requested features in early March, including a cleaner Xbox guide and custom colors across the UI. This delighted fans that had been waiting years to disable Quick Resume on a per-game basis. The ability to ship these changes also delighted Xbox engineering lead Eden Marie, who posted on X in early March that “it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this energized at work.”
It’s no surprise that Xbox engineers love shipping features to millions of fans who will use them immediately, instead of having to work on an Xbox mobile store that never shipped.
Sharma looks set to continue making even bigger Xbox platform investments, with the next-gen Project Helix console on the horizon. In her internal memo this week, Sharma lays out what she’s learned about the Xbox platform:
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