From Slashing Game Pass Prices To The PHYSINT Deal, How Asha Sharma Made Xbox Great Again

When you are a video gaming brand like Xbox, you’d imagine that the best leader for your company would be someone who knows gaming and the industry like the back of their hand. This was Phil Spencer's résumé almost exactly. He joined Microsoft as an intern in 1988, climbed the ladder, and spent twelve years running its gaming division till his retirement earlier this year. Inside the industry, he was known as the executive who reportedly still played games during his own meetings. You know, that kind of fan who also happened to run the company.

Xbox’s new CEO, Asha Sharma, is not that person. Before becoming CEO of Xbox in February 2026, she had never worked a day in games. She spent four years as a product and engineering VP at Meta, two years in Microsoft's marketing organisation, and was Instacart’s chief operating officer during its 2023 IPO. She’s a marketing exec through and through.

And yet, within seven months, Asha Sharma has arguably done more for Xbox than Spencer did during his tenure. Under her, Xbox is becoming cool again.

A Crumbling Empire

When she was named CEO on February 20, 2026, Sharma inherited a division that was on a freefall: years of aggressive studio acquisitions, confusing platform-agnostic marketing, and consecutive subscription price hikes had left the core player base feeling alienated and the brand identity severely diluted. Hardware revenue had dropped close to 10 per cent in the quarter before she took over, steeper than Microsoft had projected. Microsoft’s massive $23-billion-a-year gaming unit made very little actual profit, just at about three per cent a year. Console sales for the Xbox Series X and S fell so much that Microsoft stopped publishing traditional sales numbers altogether. 

You’d think this was a sure-shot glass cliff scenario. Yet, today, seven months into her tenure, the Indian-origin CEO has made herself somewhat of a darling of the video gaming industry.

In July, she announced roughly 3,200 job cuts, close to a fifth of the gaming division's workforce, alongside a reduction in the number of games in active development. Several of those cuts are still working their way through the organisation. Of course, this sounded like bad news (which it was, not to forget the barrage of racist comments that followed her appointment).  

She also removed massive blockbusters like Call of Duty from day-one Game Pass launches. Major marquee titles now face a 12-month post-launch delay before entering the service, preserving premium game sales while maintaining a highly valuable subscription archive.

And then, she started actually listening to the people angriest at her.

Winning the Room Back

For starters, she slashed Xbox Game Pass Ultimate prices from $29.99 to $22.99 per month (that’s 1,089 per month, down from its previous peak of ₹1,389 in India) and PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99 (₹879 per month, down from ₹939), acknowledging herself that gaming has become to expensive when it doesn’t need to.

Not only that, publicly rejected AI-backed game creation tools within the first-party portfolio, famously declaring that "games are and always will be art crafted by humans." To back this up, she even cancelled planned console integration and stripped Copilot AI features out of the Xbox mobile app.

In July, alongside the layoffs, Xbox launched Player Voice, a public feedback board where fans upvote the changes they want most (structured, tellingly, like Reddit threads). The top request wasn't a spec bump or a cheaper tier. It was exclusivity. Since 2024, Xbox had run a "this is an Xbox" strategy of putting first-party games like Halo and Forza on PlayStation and Switch, widening the audience but leaving console loyalists wondering what buying an Xbox was even for anymore. Sharma reversed it within months: Gears of War: E-Day (out October 6) and 2027's Clockwork Revolution will both be locked to Xbox and PC.

She paired this with Disc-to-Digital: a program, currently in testing, letting owners of supported physical Xbox games scan the disc to unlock a permanent digital copy, playable on cloud and PC, while keeping the disc itself.

The timing did half the marketing for her. Sony had just confirmed it would phase out PlayStation discs entirely by 2028. Xbox's pro-physical approach only made it all the more popular.

And then, this month, she caught the goose that laid the golden egg. In mid-June, PlayStation pulled the plug on PHYSINT, Hideo Kojima's highly anticipated stealth-espionage successor to Metal Gear Solid. The project had blown past its budget and deadlines, and Kojima Productions wouldn't guarantee Sony permanent exclusivity in return for the money it needed. On September 9, Xbox announced it would publish PHYSINT. The news was a massive PR victory for Xbox, specially given its relationship to MGS, a franchise historically deeply intertwined with PlayStation nostalgia.

All in all, Sharma hasn't claimed the bigger problems are solved: margins are still thin, the next console is still unconfirmed, and there are studios she hasn't finished offloading. If there's anything we've learnt these past seven months, it is that the smallest steps can lead to bigger changes. And given the current state of the industry, listening to your customer's demands and getting them titles they really like can a leap in the right direction.