This past Friday, the video games industry, and more specifically, Xbox and Microsoft, entered a new era. A post-Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond era, with the announcement of Spencer’s retirement and Bond’s resignation. Former Microsoft CoreAI chief executive officer, Asha Sharma, took Spencer’s place, while Matt Booty stepped into a new role as Xbox’s chief content officer.
As the industry and consumers wrap their heads around the sudden shake-up, a new report from The Verge looks to provide some insight into why it happened the way it did. Why is Sarah Bond leaving Microsoft instead of being the one to replace Phil Spencer? What does this new leadership mean for Xbox’s future and its whole ‘everything is an Xbox’ initiative? Well, according to The Verge, the answer to those questions begins and ends with Sarah Bond and her departure.
Bond is pinpointed as the one who was pushing Xbox’s ‘Play Everywhere’ campaign more than anyone else, and that its ‘This is an Xbox’ marketing strategy was the result of a few key people leaving Microsoft, leaving Bond directly in charge of the platform’s marketing team. When the new campaign started to air, and those loyal to the platform on the consumer side were taken aback and even offended by it, they weren’t the only ones.
The report claims that the campaign “offended many Xbox employees internally,” and that the pivot away from a dedicated console to a broader approach focused on cloud and mobile was something that Bond championed under Spencer. It also adds that Bond’s departure comes as a relief to employees remaining at Xbox, who claimed that she was “tough to work with, and built a team structure that meant if you didn’t follow the vision or questioned it, you were out.”
That said, she was still praised by her colleagues for the ability to get big deals across the finish line, including the “crucial” role she played in securing the Activision Blizzard King deal. But that’s about all the praise the report mentions for Bond.
Everywhere else, she’s reported to be the one behind Xbox’s devaluing of its own hardware, and now that she and Spencer are out, Sharma’s job is to usher in “the return of Xbox,” which seems to include major changes and the admittance that what the team had been trying has not been working.
According to sources from the report, when it became clear that Bond’s strategy under Spencer wasn’t working after declining hardware sales and Xbox revenue dropping, staff believed that the departures felt inevitable.
The report also adds that the author has “the impression from sources that Microsoft wants a turnaround and is worried about losing Xbox, as it’s one of its only remaining successful consumer brands.” Again, that’s just a feeling the writer has based on their conversations with their sources at Xbox, but it’s a more positive one than coming away from those talks with the feeling that Sharma is really here to start cutting away at Xbox to make more room for Microsoft’s AI push.
As much as this report sets the blame at Bond’s feet, where it may very well deserve to rest, the buck stops with Phil Spencer before it stops with her. In a company as big as Microsoft, you’ll almost never be able to say that someone acted alone in their mistakes; there’s almost always someone else complicit to them.
If this report is accurate in its claims that Sharma’s tenure will turn over a new leaf for Xbox, then the test of that commitment to players will likely come with the reveal of the next major first-party Xbox title, and whether or not it is actually a game exclusive to Xbox.
New Report Claims No One, Not Even Those Internally at Xbox, Liked the “Everything is an Xbox” Strategy
