Xbox is "not in a healthy spot" and the next 100 days will be about "resetting the business," CEO Asha Sharma said in her most expansive interview since taking the role. Her goal by 2030?
Make Xbox the number one gaming and entertainment company.
Sharma sat down with Bloomberg's Emily Chang at Bloomberg Tech 2026 in San Francisco to mark her first 100 days running Microsoft's gaming division and lay out what comes next. The conversation covered everything from the Activision Blizzard deal to why she killed Xbox Copilot. The hardware business is facing an unusual problem. "With AI, memory and storage costs are going up 2.75 times rather than 50 percent down," Sharma said.
She noted that memory costs have already risen 50 percent in her first 100 days alone. That is squeezing a product line where the company is already losing money on every console sold through subsidies for memory and storage. The $400 Series S and $650 Series X remain unprofitable.
Her next 100 days will focus on making Project Helix, Microsoft's next-gen console, affordable. "The biggest challenge and opportunity is how do you make affordable products during that time?" she said. On exclusivity, Sharma walked a careful line. Xbox is 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." But she also acknowledged Xbox is "increasingly becoming a platform" and "in order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services." The answer, she suggested, will be case-by-case: "We have to be very thoughtful about each title."
Sharma confirmed pulling the Copilot feature from Xbox was her call, not Satya Nadella's. "Our console players aren't excited about that experience in their console," she said, though she emphasized she still believes in AI for game development, particularly neural rendering and production pipelines.
Pressed on whether the $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition was the right move, Sharma defended the deal. "I don't know anybody in entertainment who wouldn't want Call of Duty, which is now grossing in more revenue than the Marvel Cinematic Universe," she said. But she acknowledged the acquisition was made "at a time before ChatGPT, at a time when our strategy was predominantly on the core console, at a time when we were right in the middle of Covid."
Sharma pushed back on reports that Microsoft was holding Xbox to unsustainable 30 percent profit margins. "My mandate is not 30% accountability margin," she said.
"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."
Still. She was blunt about the division's current state. "We've got work to do," she said.
"We're not in a healthy spot, and so the next 100 days is going to be about resetting the business." That reset will involve looking at how Xbox invests, prioritizes, and operates "in order to return to growth." As for whether the next-gen Xbox will be the center of that vision by 2030, Sharma was less definitive. "We're certainly going to continue to put out great reference experiences," she said, but noted the platform will also "push out" into PC and mobile. When asked what success looks like in four years, she repeated the same line: "I'd love to see us be the number one gaming and entertainment company."
