Xbox Founder Expects the Brand to End Under New CEO

One of the co-founders of Xbox has said that he believes the brand will eventually end under the company’s new CEO. Within the past day, longtime Xbox head Phil Spencer officially retired, which led to Asha Sharma taking over in Spencer’s absence. While Sharma herself hasn’t made any major changes at Xbox just yet, one prominent figure who helped create the original Xbox console doesn’t expect good things to happen in the future.

Speaking to GamesBeat, Xbox co-founder Seamus Blackley said that he sees Xbox slowly winding down under Sharma. Although Xbox as a whole won’t cease to exist, Blackley said that Sharma is someone who will lessen the brand’s importance to Microsoft as the company instead looks to further index into AI. On a long enough timeline, Blackley explained that he thinks Sharma will have the Xbox business be taken over by AI in some capacity, which will result in Xbox as it has been known for the past 25 years going away.

“Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business, is being sunsetted,” Blackley said. “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.”

“The job of all these people is to just gently usher all of these business units into the new world of AI,” he continued. “That’s what you’re seeing here. Whether or not you agree with it, whether you agree with AI having the potential to do that, whether AI will be successful, is a separate matter. But that’s what we’re seeing. That is in no way surprising. 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. That’s at odds with the auteur model of any art, but specifically of games.”

What Could Xbox Look Like in the Future?

While Blackley is simply sharing his own opinion on these changes at Xbox, it’s hard to disagree with what he’s saying. Xbox has been struggling greatly in recent years, primarily when it comes to its console sales. Currently, Microsoft has committed to creating a successor to the Xbox Series X and S, but beyond this, there’s no guarantee that a new Xbox console will come about after this.

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As such, Xbox’s future could very well end up being one that doesn’t center around an Xbox console at all. If this is the case, the Xbox branding might very well die, which would free up resources within Microsoft to focus more heavily on AI. The gaming studios that Microsoft owns would almost certainly continue to exist, but it would simply become more of a traditional third-party publisher instead.

Whether or not things play out in this manner remains to be seen. For now, Sharma has made clear that one of her main goals as CEO is to bring Xbox back to the prominence that it once had. How she plans to go about making this goal a reality isn’t yet known.

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