New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says Microsoft is "going to keep meeting players where they are," though it sounds like that could easily be subject to change down the line.
The identity of Xbox has been all over the place over the last decade or so, but the most impactful and confusing bit has to be spending billions on acquiring Bethesda and Activision to bolster its output, only to give up on first-party entirely and release pretty much every one of its games on PS5. As such, all eyes are on the new CEO to see how that might change going forward, considering all of the talk about the future being a "return to Xbox."
Speaking to WindowsCentral, Sharma was asked about the third-party push, and what that would look like going forward. In response, Sharma implies nothing is off the table with a nice bit of non-committal wording: "the plan's the plan until it's not the plan." She explains, "Right now, I need to learn, candidly. About the 'why' of these decisions, what we were optimizing for, and what the data says about the Xbox strategy today," and that "I'm looking at lifetime value, not just what happened in a previous moment, or in short term efficiencies and things like that."
Ultimately, I feel like it's going to come down to how well the titles have done as a third-party release. Given the likes of Forza Horizon 5, Oblivion Remastered, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, all of which had very strong debuts on the platform, I could see Microsoft sticking with its current strategy. But of course, the company has consoles to sell and exclusives sell consoles, so maybe things are different when the next Xbox drops.
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