Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty detail their “return of Xbox” strategy, including daily active players as its “new north star”
Microsoft's new Xbox leader starts to talk strategy for the company's gaming business.
The VergeTom Warren
Context & Ripple Effects
The strategy follows Sharma’s earlier commitment to a “return of Xbox” and a town-hall move to restore Xbox, rather than Microsoft Gaming, as the division’s identity. Follow-up interviews add that Xbox Series X and S are meant to become a first-class experience again.
The operating backdrop is already shifting toward broader access: cloud gaming has been extended beyond the top Game Pass tier and is being tested with more PC games. That makes an engagement-based metric more consequential than a device-only framing.
First-order effects
Xbox leadership will evaluate the business more explicitly around daily active players, putting recurring use across console, cloud, and PC at the center of execution.
Sharma and Booty’s strategy gives the Xbox brand—and renewed attention to Series X and S—a clearer internal role while cloud access reaches more Game Pass subscribers.
Second-order effects
Content, platform, and Game Pass teams face stronger incentives to reduce friction between Xbox surfaces and retain players between major releases, rather than optimize solely for console sales or premium-tier conversion.
Broader cloud eligibility can make lower Game Pass tiers more strategically important, increasing pressure to distinguish subscription value through access, catalog availability, and engagement.
Third-order effects
If daily activity remains the governing metric, Xbox’s economics may increasingly resemble a service ecosystem in which hardware is one entry point among console, PC, and cloud rather than the sole center of the business.
The approach could deepen the console-to-service flywheel, but its durability depends on whether Microsoft can expand access without weakening the reasons players pay for higher-value Game Pass offerings or buy into Xbox hardware.
The trend: Xbox is moving toward an engagement-led, multi-surface gaming model in which the brand, subscription, cloud access, and hardware are managed as mutually reinforcing parts of one player ecosystem.
“We Are Xbox”: read the memo defining Microsoft's gaming future. Microsoft's new Xbox leader starts to talk strategy for the company's gaming business 👇 https://www.theverge.com/...
The Verge: ‘Sharma announced that Microsoft is returning to using Xbox for its gaming division, instead of Microsoft Gaming. “Xbox needs to be our identity,” said Sharma, noting that Microsoft Gaming was a departure from that.’ buff.ly/WfoKsoz [image]
Microsoft Gaming is dead, Microsoft is bringing back Xbox as its gaming brand. A new Xbox logo also has appeared over the campus and according to Tom Warren it was also used internal Project Helix materials. — www.theverge.com/report/91748... [image]
scoop: Microsoft is bringing Xbox back and scrapping Microsoft Gaming. During an internal all-hands today, Microsoft's new Xbox CEO announced the return of the Xbox org and lots more. Full details 👇 www.theverge.com/report/91748...
Everyone that was giving Asha shit when she took over owes her a massive apology. They were all wrong. Everything she's been doing is the right thing for gamers and seems to really understand what they like and care about. Just an incredible job in a very short time