XBOX CEO Says a Fifth Console Generation Is ‘On the Way’

XBOX’s 25th anniversary isn’t officially until November 15, but CEO Asha Sharma got a head start today with a memo that was sent to employees worldwide and published on XBOX Wire. Most of it is a look back that starts well before the original console, beginning with Microsoft Adventure in 1979 and the first Microsoft Flight Simulator in 1982. From there, it covers the DirectX team’s idea for a PC-based console in the mid-1990s, which led to the secret “Project Midway,” and the launch of the original XBOX in 2001. Sharma writes that XBOX has since built four generations of consoles, “with a fifth on the way,” referring to the next-generation hardware XBOX has been calling Project Helix. She also says XBOX’s games now reach more than a billion players every year.

The memo thanks the employees, studios, developers, and partners who built XBOX, and Sharma singles out the 111 people across XBOX and its studios who have been there for 25 years or more. Each of those 111 people will receive a special engraved console to commemorate what they helped build. She writes that XBOX has been celebrating the anniversary with fans around the world, adding, “Today, we are bringing the celebration home to Seattle.” When XBOX revealed its FanFest tour dates in August, I pointed out that Seattle, the closest thing XBOX has to a hometown stop, was the only city still without a date.

The final section of the memo is titled The Next 25, and it’s about where Sharma thinks game development is headed. She uses Microsoft Flight Simulator as her example, noting that the first one was 160KB with 20 airports, while the 2024 version draws on more than 2.5 petabytes of data. Sharma says the cost, resources, and risk required to make modern games have grown just as dramatically. “As a result, too many ideas never become games, and too many games fall short of what their creators imagined,” Sharma wrote. She argues that a single person “will soon be able to wield capabilities that once required entire nations.” She adds that a small team will be able to build worlds that currently take hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sharma doesn’t say what will make that possible, and like the XBOX LABS memo she sent last month, this one never uses the word AI. When she was named CEO in February, I said she would face an uphill battle because her time at Microsoft had been centered on AI, and I was curious how she would handle that with gamers. She closes the memo by saying XBOX’s responsibility is to “deliver great games, unmistakable hardware, and give more people the chance to make something the world has never seen.”