Asha Sharma’s elevation to CEO of Microsoft Gaming following Phil Spencer’s surprise retirement caused consternation among some gamers because, well, she’s not a gamer. Sharma only joined Microsoft in 2024 as president of its CoreAI product, and prior to that she was chief operating officer at Instacart and a vice president of product and engineering at Meta—a sharp contrast to Spencer, who waxed nostalgic about the games he loved as a kid when Microsoft plopped down $68.7 billion to buy Activision Blizzard.
One person who says he’s not concerned, though, is Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick. Asked during an interview with The Game Business what he thinks Sharma should be focused on, Zelnick, who’s been heading up Take-Two for nearly 20 years now, brushed off the idea entirely.
“I don’t think the newly appointed head of Xbox needs any advice from me,” Zelnick said. “She’s a highly accomplished executive who’s done just great without ever having met me. I’m going to bet on her continuing to do great. Moreover, I have to focus on myself doing better, before I talk about other CEOs.”
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“But the truth is that hits cure all ills. In the absence of making hits, you won’t have a successful entertainment business. That’s the thing to focus on. At Take-Two, we try to do all of the above. We try to run an amazing creative enterprise, and we try to run a highly rational, highly effective business enterprise. Sometimes we get it wrong, but that’s what we try to do.”
Zelnick’s insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, I feel like I sense a small undercurrent of advice in there—and yes, you could argue that ‘make hit games’ is easy to say when you’re the Grand Theft Auto company, but it’s an approach Zelnick seems to take seriously. Take-Two seemed to be aiming for more high-minded things when it launched the Private Division label in 2017, but seven years later it offloaded the whole thing because, as Zelnick said at the time, “We are top-ten hit makers around here,” and the indie-focused Private Division simply didn’t fit into that calculus.