Xbox under new CEO Asha Sharma has been moving quickly. In the past two months alone, the company has killed its controversial “This Is an Xbox” marketing campaign, confirmed its next-generation Project Helix console, and just this week rolled back Game Pass pricing while pulling Call of Duty from day one on the service. Today, Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty published a company-wide memo titled “We Are Xbox” that outlines what this era is supposed to look like, and the biggest structural change is the name itself.
“Microsoft Gaming describes our structure but it does not describe our ambition,” Sharma and Booty wrote, confirming a rebrand back to the original Xbox name. The team is also setting four strategic priorities: hardware, content, experience, and services. The new north star metric is daily active players, which is a pretty telling shift away from console sales, game sales, or even subscription numbers. It makes sense given Xbox says it now reaches over 500 million players globally, though it also means a mobile phone running a casual Xbox-owned game counts the same as a player on console.
The most striking part of the memo is how candid it gets about where Xbox stands. “Players are frustrated,” Sharma and Booty wrote, calling out less-frequent console feature drops, a PC presence that isn’t strong enough, rising prices, and fragmented core experiences around search, discovery, social, and personalization. Developers and publishers are apparently looking for more too, specifically better tools, better insights, and a platform that helps them grow faster. It’s a level of corporate self-awareness that’s been rare from Xbox in recent years, and it frames the whole memo as basically a reset for the team.
The four priorities each get concrete commitments. Hardware centers on stabilizing the current Xbox Series X|S generation while delivering Project Helix and leading in accessories. Content focuses on growing existing franchises, expanding into China and mobile-first audiences, and elevating creator-centric platforms like Minecraft, The Elder Scrolls, and Sea of Thieves. Experience is about fixing the fundamentals and overhauling discovery, customization, social, and personalization, which lines up directly with what Sharma and Booty flagged as sources of player frustration. Services is about fortifying Game Pass with sustainable economics and making cloud play feel native across TVs and low-cost devices. The memo also notes the team will “reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI,” which is a pretty significant item to casually drop into a list.
Sharma and Booty closed with a ten-item list of team values with statements like “Earn every player,” “Protect our art,” and “Makers over managers,” then wrapped up by noting they’re 62 days in. Whether any of this translates to meaningful change for players is the real question, but between the recent Game Pass pricing rollback, killing “This Is an Xbox,” and now officially dropping the Microsoft Gaming name, Sharma’s direction has been consistent. The first real test comes at the summer Xbox Games Showcase in June, with Project Helix’s eventual launch being the one that actually matters long-term.
