Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has made a number of big changes since taking over from former chief Phil Spencer. Some of them—dialling back Game Pass, leaning into exclusives—collectively represent a pretty clear repudiation of Spencer’s strategies. In a new interview with Fortune (via Game Developer), Sharma was more explicit about her belief that Spencer got it wrong, saying that as a result of his approach, “[we] spread ourselves too thin.”
“In order to grow, we made a bunch of bets … and as we did that, we inherently didn’t focus on the core business,” Sharma said. “The number one measure of your strategy is what you put your resources behind, and we simply spread ourselves too thin.”
That belief reflects Sharma’s approach to the job, which—as much as any of it can be described as a coherent strategy at this point—seems to be built around a return to treating the Xbox as a conventional console. Naturally, layoffs are also a part of it: The Fortune interview was published on the same day that Sharma announced 3,200 layoffs at Xbox, and the spinoff of four of its studios.
Sharma also returned to one of her key points in that layoff announcement: That the Xbox business is not “healthy.”