It’s been a whirlwind week for Xbox, and Microsoft’s gaming brand is still in a transitionary phase. Even with a new captain in charge of righting the floundering ship that is Xbox, the near-future story of Xbox won’t be drastically different than what was already promised.
Longtime Microsoft exec and previous head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, announced his retirement on Feb. 20. Xbox President Sarah Bond also shared she was leaving Microsoft altogether. On Tuesday this week, the company gave Spencer his official sendoff with the full cheering squad and a proverbial handing of the torch (Xbox controller) to new principal Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.
Phil Spencer introducing the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming in front of the team.
pic.twitter.com/zRsunInPUi
— Stealth (@Stealth40k) February 24, 2026
The new leader of Microsoft’s gaming brand—who previously headed the company’s CoreAI division—mentioned how she wants to return to Xbox’s “renegade spirit” with games not made with “soulless AI.” It’s all the things Xbox fans want to hear. However, she also said, “Gaming now lives across devices, not within the limits of any single piece of hardware.” That includes PC, mobile, and cloud. That $30 Game Pass Ultimate subscription won’t suddenly become an afterthought to Xbox’s grand strategy. Even if Xbox does change, it will take time.
In a Windows Central interview, Sharma claimed “nothing is off the table” regarding game exclusivity or Xbox’s entire strategy, saying “the plan’s the plan until it’s not the plan.” What’s clear is that Sharma has a massive mountain to climb. The gaming industry is in a bad spot. The only spots of growth for gaming are from China and Roblox. Xbox is doing worse than most, based on its most recent quarterly financial report showing major losses across hardware and software sales.
Xbox can’t change as fast as fans may want
We still don’t know what a next-gen Xbox will look like. © Adriano Contreras / GizmodoYou can’t steer a ship as large as Xbox so quickly. Xbox has plans to launch a new console, and Sharma said the brand will have more announcements on that front soon. Xbox’s new chief content officer, Matt Booty, also warned players shouldn’t expect drastic changes in the next few months. Effectively, what we can see soon is a difference in messaging, though not a change in console strategy from what was pushed by the previous Xbox C-suite.
Previous Xbox President Sarah Bond didn’t receive nearly as much pomp and circumstance as did Spencer. The Verge’s Tom Warren further pushed the idea that there was lingering antipathy toward Bond. Twelve or so anonymous Xbox employees said she had been in charge of pushing the “Everything is an Xbox” campaign that confused non-gamers and angered Xbox fans. They even went so far as to claim that she was somehow “tough to work with.”
I had a chance to talk to Bond in an off-the-record chat shortly after the launch of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. While I won’t relay any specifics about what we talked about, it was clear handheld and console hardware were at the top of her mind. She knew the Xbox Ally had issues, namely in the software department, but she seemed willing to at least take good faith criticism and more suggestions about what could come next.
The new Xbox console won’t change with new leadership. According to the mostly reliable leaker Moore’s Law is Dead, the next-gen Xbox is practically design-complete. The purported chipset—a semi-custom AMD processor built with the yet-unreleased Zen 6 CPU and RDNA 5 microarchitecture—is set in stone. With last year’s handhelds, Xbox has been slowly building a software environment based on Windows 11, allowing the console to play non-Xbox titles on platforms like Steam or Epic Games Store. Unless Xbox wants to shutter the brand altogether, this design will feature prominently as the next-gen Xbox as early as 2027, at least according to AMD CEO Lisa Su. Whether it has the 360-era blade dashboard or not doesn’t actually change what’s coming.
Should bring the blade dashboard?
— Asha (@asha_shar) February 21, 2026
The next year of Xbox titles also won’t suddenly become exclusive to current Xbox consoles. Titles like Fable, Halo: Campaign Evolved, and Gears of War: E-Day are coming to PlayStation 5 on day one. Sharma told Windows Central she still has to do the rounds at all the many major game studios under Xbox’s broad, green umbrella. She only just started trying to understand the entire brand last month, as suggested by her published Gamertag. Sharma may be able to preach to the lingering Xbox fans that she may grant them their hearts’ desires, but whether any of it happens will take far longer to materialize.
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