New Xbox boss Asha Sharma: Does a game manager need to play games herself?

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Asha Sharma has had to put up with a lot since her appointment as the new Xbox CEO: in addition to racist and sexist attacks, there is the accusation that she is not a “real gamer.” Her background as an AI manager worries many even further. Even a co-founder of Xbox is skeptical: “I think her job is to gently slide Xbox into the night, like a palliative care doctor,” Seamus Blackley said in an interview with GamesBeat.

Blackley was instrumental in pushing Microsoft's console plans in the late 90s and early 2000s and ultimately developing the first Xbox. He is considered one of the fathers of the first Xbox console but left Microsoft again in 2002. After almost 25 years, he is unlikely to have current insights into Microsoft's decision-making, but he certainly has an opinion.

“Games are and always will be art”

“It just feels really true,” Blackley explains to GamesBeat, referring to his assumptions. He compares Sharma's appointment to a film studio head who dislikes movies or a music label CEO who has never seen a live concert. “The job of these people is simply to gently guide all these business areas into the new world of AI. That's exactly what we're seeing here. Whether you agree with it or not, whether you believe AI has this potential, whether AI will be successful – that's a separate question. But that's what's happening.”

Sharma must have been aware that her background in the AI industry would cause skepticism in the Xbox community when she prepared her statement upon taking office. “As monetization and AI evolve and shape the future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop,” Sharma writes. “Games are and always will be art, created by humans.”

“Understand this world”

However, Blackley also quite clearly implies that Sharma has little knowledge of video games. Sharma does not come from the industry and has worked at Instacart and Meta, among others. Whether and how much she plays herself is the subject of discussion: After she posted her Xbox gamertag on X, several gaming media outlets immediately pounced on it. The finding: The account is very new, and she collected her first achievement in January 2026.

“I just created my gamertag to learn and understand this world,” Sharma writes on X. She had shared it with her family meanwhile, which is why several people had played on different devices. “I'm not pretending to be the best gamer,” she explains.

One cannot deny that Sharma at least wants to engage with games: On X, she asked her new followers for recommendations for titles – and then actually tried them out, as Windows Central observed when examining Sharma's gamertag.

In the shadow of Phil Spencer

It is above all the contrast to her predecessor, Phil Spencer, that makes the topic so sensitive: Spencer is considered an authentic gaming fan, reportedly playing around 15 hours a week. His Xbox gamertag shows hundreds of played titles. He was able to appear credible and with expertise in conversations with the community. Sharma will not be able to do that for now, as she herself admits on X.

Does Sharma even have to play to be able to lead Xbox successfully? That is controversial. Game development legend Tim Schafer already warned against CEOs in 2010 who don't like games: “I don't think he's great for the industry, overall,” Schafer said about the then Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, whom he accused of a genuine aversion to video games. “You can't just latch onto something when it's popular and then squeeze the life out of it and then move on to the next one. You have to at some point create something, build something.” In retrospect, Kotick did not do the industry any good – but above all for completely different reasons.

“Not the Consumer-in-Chief”

However, Sharma is by no means the only CEO of a game company without a significant gaming background. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick is very open about it: “I don't play at all,” Zelnick said last year in a conversation with CNBC about “GTA 6”. “I'm not the Consumer-in-Chief, that's not my job.” His job is rather to hire the best people and then get out of their way. Given the sales figures of the “GTA” series, this strategy seems to be working quite well.

However, the truth is also that Zelnick would never dream of announcing games himself in livestreams, chatting with fans on social media, and philosophizing about the gaming hobby on podcasts – it is a different leadership style than what Xbox players are used to from Phil Spencer. Phil Spencer was CEO, but he was also a mascot – until she can fill those shoes, Sharma will have to try many more games.

(dahe)