I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.
It just seems really true. I imagine asking somebody if it made sense to put a major motion picture studio into the hands of somebody who didn’t like movies, or a major record label into the hands of somebody who’d never seen a live show. Why would you do that? Well, you only do that if you’re looking at the problem in a more abstract way. 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. There’s a core belief, and you can see it in what Satya said, that AI will subsume games like it will subsume everything.
The job of all these people is to just gently usher all of these business units into the new world of AI. That’s what you’re seeing here. Whether or not you agree with it, whether you agree with AI having the potential to do that, whether AI will be successful, is a separate matter. But that’s what we’re seeing.
I have gotten back into Xbox gaming over the past several years - after I converted to PC for awhile. I’m a gamer that also used to get a PlayStation 2 and 3 to play a few exclusives and then eventually trade it in. What I’ll say about this is that gaming on several platforms is optimal in my view, particularly to change up the experience and my seating posture - PC has advantages and so does console (and particularly Nintendo exclusive games). It seems like the older trend is re-emerging where exclusive games will stay exclusive to just Xbox or PlayStation, and Sony may stop porting games over to the PC. And while I like to change up the experience, I’d actually also like to centralize my achievements more, and what I mean by this, is basically to port my steam achievements over to my Xbox profile whenever possible (I do realize that its not really too realistic, but it might be in the future). That would be cool, and looks like may be possible with some newer games now. I did this with Halo recently, by signing in on steam, I downloaded all of my game data and achievements for the Master Chief collection from playing it about 10 years ago from my Xbox profile over to Steam, so playing on the PC, it will be linked to the Xbox as well. Xbox probably can afford to port games over to PlayStation too, but it looks like that’s not the direction they’re going in.
Since 2018, Xbox has proudly and publicly championed accessibility with the release of the Xbox Adaptive Controller, as well as a plethora of innovative, award-winning features like Forza’s Blind Driving Assists and Doom: The Dark Ages’ game speed and difficulty options. Disabled players have expected robust accessibility offerings created by each Xbox studio.
Now, according to former employees and contractors, the vastness of layoffs, particularly surrounding people working on accessibility within games and Xbox services, is going to impact how disabled individuals interact with Xbox. Xbox has restructured a centralized accessibility team, removed all funding for Microsoft Gaming Accessibility Testing Services (MGATS), and eliminated accessibility testers for games and compliance experts for Xbox sites. People who spoke to Aftermath are grappling with uncertainty about how these layoffs will impact future games, services, and even digital access.
