Newly-appointed Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, has now spent over 100 days in her new role. Speaking recently at Bloomberg Tech Live, the executive was asked yet again about the company’s stance on exclusivity for first-party games, and whether or not this can even be managed when Microsoft is also one of the largest third-party publishers in the world.
Unfortunately, her answers don’t bring much clarity, as Xbox’s stance more or less remains unchanged. Sharma is aware that platforms “need” exclusive content, but she also states repeatedly that successful publishers need to reach players everywhere they can.
“I think it’s a tough topic,” Sharma said, when asked what she felt the future of exclusivity looks like. “Look, we’re the number two publisher in the world and, in order to be a great publisher, you must have your games reach large audiences to play.”
“At the same time, we’re increasingly becoming a platform,” she added, in the same answer. “In order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and so, we’re looking at that very closely.”
Sharma immediately followed that up by reiterating what many feel has been Xbox’s stance all along: “I think that we have to be very thoughtful about each title, on how we want to think about it, and learn from similar cases in the industry. And that’s what we’re doing,” she explained.
From the moment she took charge of Microsoft’s gaming division, the executive has shared her desire to bring back the brand, and “return to Xbox”. That has resulted in some broader recommitments to Xbox hardware, but it also extended to gestures about maybe, potentially, changing Xbox’s stance on exclusivity.
Beyond having a silly argument about logos of rival platforms showing up on Xbox livestreams, and renaming Microsoft Gaming to Xbox (sorry, XBOX) no decisions about exclusivity have actually been made. Games already announced for PS5 have not been cancelled for Sony’s console, and there’s little indication that unannounced titles from first-party studios would be limited to just Xbox, and PC going forward.
In fact, the only decision Sharma made that had a tangible effect has been cutting the price of Xbox Game Pass, though she was able to do so at the expense of taking Call of Duty out of the service.
One interesting revelation made during the Bloomberg Tech Live interview is that Microsoft’s goal with Xbox, according to Sharma, isn’t to get the division to reach the standard 30 percent profitably goal that Microsoft has for its software divisions.
“So my mandate is not 30 percent accountability margin,” said Sharma. “It’s not enterprise software margins. It’s to be the number one gaming and entertainment company. and that’s what we’re going to go do.”
That 30 percent is notable, as it was cited in a recent report as a major reason why Xbox has been more aggressively laying people off, and why it was eager to explore more revenue streams by publishing its games on rival platforms. While the 30 percent margin was never officially confirmed, it’s curious that Sharma explicitly brought it up as a mandate she does not have for Xbox.
