Clarifying his stance following recent comments on the direction of Xbox under new CEO Asha Sharma, original Xbox co-founder and console designer Seamus Blackley stressed that he does not think the whole brand and business is "dead," though he does think it's in for some hard lessons.
"I have been asked 59 times now, due to this [Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat] article, if I believe [Xbox] is dead," Blackley says on Bluesky.
"No," he continued. "I love Xbox as my own flesh and blood. It's the most wonderful thing to me. The distress it's in kills me, haunts me. But progress requires introspection and realism. Learning is pain."
Blackley makes it clear that he wants the best for Xbox as a whole. In a separate reply on Bluesky, he says, "I love Xbox more than literally anyone. This is killing me. But I know a lot about organizations and business now, and I was being honest, not a PR asshole. Let's talk about it."
"It's literally something I nearly died to bring into existence. Seeing it struggle and being unable to act is hard," he adds.
Blackley raised eyebrows with his prediction that Xbox would be "sunsetted" under Sharma, much like a lot of non-AI businesses, as Microsoft invests in an AI-first future. He did not mince words: "They don't say that, but that's what's happening. 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."
However, he also suggested that Xbox and its new leadership are in for some rude awakenings, and this seems to be what his latest comments are building on – the idea that Xbox as we know it will have to change, but the whole thing won't up and disappear even if Microsoft may change or sideline it in favor of AI.
Previously, Blackley said of games: "It's a difficult wall to scale. Because it's games – one thing that I've learned across my career is that everyone believes they're a game developer. Everyone thinks they're a game designer. There's something about games – when you play them, they seem so effortless. There's an assumption that anyone can do it. This can also get you in a lot of trouble. Asha's statement in there about how she'll figure it out reminds me a lot of that. I've been around a lot of that. I've had Bill Gates say that to me. I've had Steven Spielberg say that to me. I've had a lot of really smart people say, basically, that line to me. It's funny for me to see that in there as well."
On Sharma's "hilarious" statement suggesting she is "looking forward to seeing what makes games work or something like that" (Blackley's description of her statement, not a direct quote of Sharma), he warned of the "very thick concrete wall" that this thinking always runs into.
Because games are a "passion" business, and because gamers are "not tolerant" of "being told what games are by people who are not gamers," this ideology clashes with the whole industry and audience, he said.
"Asha is coming into games because her boss believes that games are going to be driven by AI," he said. "It's a very different approach. You can tell that they're really serious about games being fixed by AI because madame doth protest so much about how they're not going to make slop and it's all human-controlled. For anyone over a certain age with a certain amount of business experience, you recognize those words for what they are."
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