The Executive Director of XBOX, Asha Sharma, appeared in a new interview for Fortune, and one of the topics she discussed was consoles and where they might go in the future. Asha Sharma believes that XBOX can return to its winning ways by refocusing on its core gaming principles.
Since taking office, Sharma has been preaching the "return of XBOX," a theme she emphasized on Tuesday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado. Her strategy includes preserving leading franchises like Halo and ensuring that the platform remains accessible. This philosophy, she said, prompted her recent decision to lower Game Pass prices, which is one of her most significant moves so far.
“One of our operational principles is to earn every player,” she said. “So, in the last few months, we have delivered more games on our platform than in the past year. We have managed to see a return to growth on Game Pass.”
Sharma spent part of the conversation discussing how component prices and shortages are currently causing a "crisis" for hardware manufacturers, and that therefore XBOX "must think about other options" for "cost construction" in consoles.
“We are currently in a crisis, the whole industry is...”
XBOX and other gaming companies are facing a shortage of memory and storage as demand for artificial intelligence rises. Rising hardware costs are also burdening the company. Sharma noted that the costs of certain console components will continue to rise. In response to this, she said that XBOX is creating more flexible consumer plans and exploring distribution partnerships to reach a new audience.
“We need to think about other ways of thinking about the costs of building a console. We need to think about how we create different plans so that more people can participate in the console. We need to think about partnerships that will allow us better distribution and reach. And we need to think about the experiences we create outside of that to reach a new audience.”
The Executive Director of XBOX then suggested that we will see "radically different business models" for consoles in the future, rather than just focusing on creating "the best, high-performance consoles in the world."
“I think we will continue to look for new business models. I think that’s what is needed for the console, not just the best high-performance console in the world. I think we have reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that the mass audience can afford to spend thousands of dollars on a generation of consoles, so I think we will start to see radically different business models later this year that we never expected to start coming into orbit.”
Sharma reiterated in the conversation that she is excited about Xbox Project Helix and that it is a console that will allow us to play both PC games and games from previous console generations (Backwards Compatibility Program).
