Less than two months have actually passed since Phil Spencer retired as head of Microsoft's entire gaming division and was replaced by Asha Sharma. At the time, many were concerned about her background as head of Microsoft's AI division, but she quickly won over the community by clearly rejecting any AI slop, promising a comeback for Xbox consoles, and scrapping the criticised "This is an Xbox" campaign.
Since then, things have been moving at a breakneck pace, with promises to further expand its already industry-leading backward compatibility, fix the issues with Quick Resume, they have presented Project Helix, organised an Xbox Partner Preview, and as recently as last week, a major overhaul of the Achievements system was promised. Yet Sharma isn't done, and as recently as yesterday we reported that she thinks Game Pass has become too expensive and wants to increase the value of the subscription for us gamers.
But... why stop there? On The Xbox Two Podcast (via Pure Xbox), Windows Central editor Jez Corden now says his sources reveal that there is currently a lot of internal discussion about exclusive Xbox content:
"There are very, very, very big discussions about the exclusivity stuff going on right now. They do recognise the value - it's just about what kind of company you want to be, at the end of the day. Do you want to be an ecosystem company first, or do you want to be a publishing company first?"
Corden says that internally at Microsoft, all the way up to CEO Satya Nadella, they've begun to realise that Xbox holds greater value for the company than they've previously been willing to acknowledge:
"You can't do both well, either the hardware operation will shrink to basically what Surface is now, a shadow of its former self, not its deathbed, do you really want that for your Xbox brand which is the only consumer‑facing ecosystem which has any form of cloud with consumers, and Satya said in the leaked conversation with the staff Xbox have also value in the corporate side because when I meet with a lot of executives they don't want to talk about cloud, they want to talk about Xbox, they want to talk about Halo they want to talk about Xbox games, it's where you reach your consumers when they're not working, I think increasingly they recognise this."
That said, the issue isn't entirely straightforward because ultimately Microsoft's games have sold incredibly well on PlayStation consoles. Corden concludes by saying that "at the end of the day they leave money at the table and it's hard to fight against the spreadsheet".
What do you think Asha Sharma and her Xbox team will ultimately decide?