The bloke who forced the Volish suits to take gaming seriously Seamus Blackley, told Gamebeat Microsoft is planning to kill off the Xbox.
Microsoft has named Asha Sharma as Xbox chief executive, replacing Phil Spencer, while chief operating officer and president Sarah Bond is leaving the company. Sharma teams up with Matt Booty, described as the number two executive and a link to Microsoft’s game studios.
Blackley thinks the context is everything, with Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella throwing money and credibility at a generative AI future.
“From Microsoft. Satya Nadella has made an incredible number of bets and invested an incredible amount of money and credibility in the transformation of the AI future. Xbox, like many businesses that aren’t core AI businesses, is being sunsetted. They don’t say that, but that’s what’s happening. I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, will be a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.”
He framed the hire as a sign Microsoft sees games as an abstract problem to be swallowed by models, not a creative culture to be nurtured.
“The natural consequence of the focus on AI is that AI abstracts every problem from the minds of the executives who believe in it. We’re abstracting the problem of games as well,” Blackley said.
Blackley mocked the idea of dropping an industry outsider into a content business and expecting magic, comparing it to running a movie studio without liking films. He said Microsoft does not have the same kind of auteur content headaches as the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple or Netflix, apart from games, which makes the strategy feel even stranger.
He argued that executives are treating generative AI like a hammer, treating every business unit as a nail, and that games are not escaping the workshop.
“It’s like the thing people say about having a hammer, and everything is a nail. That’s incredibly true of Microsoft right now. Everything is a gen AI problem,” he said.
Blackley said gamers will not politely swallow “AI slop”, no matter how nicely it is packaged in a press release His advice to Sharma was blunt, starting with whether she can genuinely care about games rather than treating them as a software-as-a-service exercise.
Blackley said: “If I were talking to her, I would say, look, if you’re not really passionate about games, or if you can’t develop a passion for games, then you should find a way to leave this job soon.”
