With Microsoft’s recent moves to rebrand its gaming division into Xbox, and even bringing in new logo, new CEO of the division, Asha Sharma, certainly seems to have major plans moving forward. Sharma, along with chief content officer Matt Booty, discussed their vision for the future of Xbox in an interview with Game File, as well as what this means for hardware that is already out, like the ROG Xbox Ally handheld gaming PC.
Interestingly, the company’s plans to be more open with its future hardware came up as well, while former Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer had said that, “Unless their policy or stance on it changes, they are telling us they’re going to welcome that,” referring to third-party storefronts like the Epic Games Store on Project Helix.
Discussing whether it would be economically viable for an Xbox console to allow these storefronts, Sharma said, “So what we shared with our team is that we want the platform to be open for more people to create on the platform and more players to participate in customizing and extending that.” However, when it comes to the ROG Xbox Ally, there don’t seem to be any concrete plans in place, at least for now.
“I wasn’t part of those conversations, so we’ll make those decisions going forward as a team and with our partners,” she said. “We’ll share more when we can.”
Sharma also discussed the company’s plans to make its hardware and services more affordable. She noted that, “historically, our pricing hasn’t been as flexible. And I think that’s the big thing we want to go work on. You saw that with Game Pass. It had become too expensive. So we took step to address that.”
“I want to continue to make sure, as we build hardware, software, services, we’re spending just as much time on performance and play time as we are on making sure that we can innovate to offer more affordable devices and hardware and services,” she continued. “And so, look, there’s a reality to the market that we’re in, so there are no promises around what the price points are or anything like that. But I want to make sure that people around the world are able to play.”
Looking to the future, Booty elaborated on having to compete for the attention of players – a subject that was brought up in the company-wide memo released by the two. When it comes to discussing the fact that Xbox has to deal with players already having access to several games, and development times in general getting longer, he said, “It’s on us to understand the fans.”
“Our job is to…build what the fans want to play and create places for them to play, and worlds to explore.”
“So the understanding is for us to think about how the expectations have changed around how social games are, around the approachability, how easy they are to get into, about the balance between satisfying the core that wants really sweaty, hard games, but making sure we don’t lock people out that want to join for the first time.”