The new CEO of Xbox, Asha Sharma, has been active on the social media platform X since Microsoft announced she is taking over for Phil Spencer as the head of Xbox. The surprising appointment comes less than two years after Sharma joined the company. The 37-year-old has no background in gaming and was previously operating as the President of CoreAI at Microsoft. In contrast, the man she has replaced, the aforementioned Spencer, served at Microsoft for 38 years and was famously known as an avid enthusiast of games.
On X, Sharma has been interacting with Xbox fans and the wider industry, revealing things such as her three favorite games, which are Valheim, GoldenEye, and Halo. Much of it is community management 101 and PR-speak — conspiracy theorists think it’s all AI — but there is one post that has caught the eye of Xbox fans in particular, and that’s a post about exclusives.
A New Era for Xbox Exclusives?
The majority of Xbox games are multi-platform. This has happened over the last few years, and as far as we know, it was Microsoft figureheads who pressured the Xbox team into this direction. Yet, Sharma’s new post strangely suggests this is under reconsideration.
Tweeting at the new CEO, one Xbox fan harped on the importance of Xbox exclusive games, noting, among other things, “Xbox games must only be on Xbox.” Now, Sharma has a bajillion people tweeting at her right now, and has no obligation to respond to any specific comment thrown her way. Yet, she deliberately — in a calculated fashion — responded to this with, “hear you.”
Obviously, this is a vague and non-committal response, but it has given some Xbox fans the impression that Xbox’s exclusive policy could change. But it is obviously not going to change. It’s not Spencer who was holding back Xbox exclusives from being Xbox exclusives. That was a Microsoft decision. And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is not going to budge, and Sharma is almost certainly not even going to try to get him to budge. To be fair, though, this is just speculation based on previous and extensive reporting about the war between Xbox leadership and Microsoft executives over the past few years. If you take this post from Sharma at face value, it does suggest the exclusive policy could change, but don’t hold your breath.
All of that said, and as always, feel free to leave a comment or two letting us know what you think, or join the conversation over on the ComicBook Forum.