'Xbox Is Not For Sale,' Says Microsoft's Gaming Chief (windowscentral.com)
- Reference: 0185911166
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/09/30/1954253/xbox-is-not-for-sale-says-microsofts-gaming-chief
- Source link: https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/xbox-is-not-for-sale-says-ceo-asha-sharma-why-is-this-sell-off-narrative-so-prevalent-right-now
> Microsoft's [3]vast layoffs across the summer have hit Xbox in their thousands, with studios like Ninja Theory on the [4]path to being closed , and others like Double Fine being divested completely. Microsoft has effectively shut down Halo Studios itself and handed off the franchise to Call of Duty showrunners instead, as Xbox aggressively seeks to restructure for its next decade.
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> [...] The NYT interviewed (paywall) Sharma recently covering the Xbox layoffs generally. The outlet said that Asha "did not stall" in declaring Xbox not-for-sale. "Xbox is not for sale. [...] We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that. [...] We've got a long way to go with Microsoft and we're going to take the long-term view."
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> The NYT quite patronizingly called the comment a "bob and weave" seemingly unwilling to let go of the idea of divestiture. It's great shareholder bait; Xbox has long been an aspirational type of product, and it has been a loss leader in some regards. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has remarked in the past about how, despite the fact Xbox isn't a huge profit generator, fandom of the brand has led to lucrative deals for Azure on the business side of things. Yet, shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead...
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/xbox-is-not-for-sale-says-ceo-asha-sharma-why-is-this-sell-off-narrative-so-prevalent-right-now
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/arts/xbox-microsoft-asha-sharma.html
[3] https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/07/06/1827209/microsoft-lays-off-nearly-5000-employees-across-xbox-commercial-sales
[4] https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/05/09/1414219/microsofts-xbox-is-planning-more-cuts-after-studio-closings
We already know that Xboxes no longer sell... (Score:1)
... and that they are just clearing out their remaining stock at excessive prices for the die-hard fan-boys :-)
Re: (Score:2)
The excessive prices are due to donny's tarrifs and datacenters snatching up all the memory production.
Windows needs XBox (Score:2)
Windows' real only advantage over macOS and Linux is its gaming audience. Xbox is a huge part of making sure it's expanding that audience aggressively, since many gamers only play set-top rigs, and not desk-top rigs. If MS starts bleeding gamers, even on the set-top side, it means they're losing their foothold in defining the primary gaming platform, which is a huge part of their moat around Windows users. AI is adding generic uncertainty to the future of every vertical, so without loss of generality, it ma
Re:Windows needs XBox (Score:4, Insightful)
Preeeeetty sure corporate lock-in is about ten thousand times more important to them than gamers.
Re: (Score:2)
The numbers are pretty clear: Xbox is relatively irrelevant to Microslop's bottom line, both in terms of revenue and in terms of profit. And that is reason enough for a corporation to abandon "that thing that dilutes our profit margins".
Re: (Score:2)
Not a lot of games are Windows only anymore. If you ask me their only real advantage is inertia.
Re: (Score:2)
Y'all know XBox is effectively running Windows, don't you? Makes developing games to run on both WIndows and XBox somewhat easier.
Re: (Score:3)
Windows' advantage over macos and linux is its rich fleet management software and its massive presence in large organizations. They've also got the fact that they're preinstalled on very nearly every laptop that isn't a mac or a chromebook. I wonder just what percentage of their userbase is gamers and whether it's north or south of 5%.
Not for sale (Score:2)
"We can kill it off ourselves. Thanks anyway."
Tosses it on the pile of Zune, Bob, ME, OutLook, Clippy, IE, Cortana, ...
Re: (Score:2)
> "We can kill it off ourselves. Thanks anyway."
> Tosses it on the pile of Zune, Bob, ME, OutLook, Clippy, IE, Cortana, ...
I came to post this but you did it well. Nice sense of history there.
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot, Microsoft managed to destroy the unbreakable Nokia!
Re: (Score:2)
Oh noes! No more [1]toilet paper. [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nokia_Toilet_paper.JPG
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly, who would want Microsoft's XBox division? Isn't it losing money in the billions every quarter right now?
Other than the IP for their few remaining successful game franchises, there isn't much worth buying here. They would be lucky to get pennies on the dollar for all the money they invested into it over the past 10 years.
Geometry is dead (Score:2)
What will a 'Game Studio' be?
The era of parametric shapes and vertices and triangles and shaders will soon be done and gone.
Game views, and the scenarios themselves will be generated on the fly, by request,
rendered by some AI engine, to meet one's specific, custom view requirements.
Music and voice too. It will be the way it's all delivered.
Not yet, but soon. A way easier path to hyper-realism than having to model and light it all,
and as we've seen, that they can't do it today without requiring an Nvidia spa
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
> Yeah, AI is known for its efficiency and not needing a lot of Nvidia space heaters.
May I introduce the Apple Mac Studio? ;-)
"Apple Silicon M5 Max
Built for creators, developers, engineers, and all kinds of pros, M5 Max delivers exceptional performance and on-device AI compute. Edit high-resolution RAW stacks, compile massive codebases, push real-time 3D and motion graphics, and run large language models locally.
Apple Silicon M5 Ultra
M5 Ultra fuses two M5 Max chips into a single SoC — resulting in the most CPU cores of any Mac, the most powerful Apple silicon GPU ever, and our
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, everyone knows that times a million. That's not the point.
You have 100,000 PCs, each with a hot GPU vs. AI gen-ed from a load balanced server farm someplace.
All things being equal, and they're not, the AI generated stream experience would be superior,
infinitely customizable and scalable and reactive in ways beyond the design studio world's plans.
And contrary to some opinions, probably using way less power and way less dedicated hardware.
Like I said, we're not there yet, but it's possible and we've see
Geometry defines a scene, AI or no AI (Score:1)
> Geometry is dead
Geometry defines a scene. Pixels are ultimately derived from some geometric scene description. Regardless of AI or no AI.
Perhaps you meant to say the scene geometry could be AI derived from a human natural language description?
That said, it would be fun to turn the descriptions from old text adventure games into images. AI generated illustrations. Maybe a new time and quality benchmark?. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
What I'm getting at is there will be modeling, lighting, and animating "by hand" like before.
Not that this would be the best example, but one of these systems should be able
to be shown a picture of some lake in a park, you can ask for a Mario and Master Chief scenario
and entities that act expectedly Mario and Halo-like appear in world, exhibiting their default behavior.
How long would it take to build that in Unity or Unreal?
Who would pay for it? (Score:2)
Xbox has been horribly managed for years, but I still miss my former boss Sarah Bond, she was a hottie!
wait (Score:3)
> shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead
Like the AI psychosis product industry isn't risky? Microsoft has nothing in that space worth mentioning. They have to buy or rent it like usual. Every time Microsoft buys something they immediately enshittify it, which they have done with a long long list of products which they turned into Windows features, most of which I thankfully cannot even remember anymore (Save, for some reason, Wolfpack -> WLBS. Weird.) and will not look up, thanks.
Maybe they could give gaming customers a discount if they'll let them use their power to run software on their consoles. I'm sure that would be a terrible idea on a lot of levels, so there should still be people who would go for it.
So xbox is for sale then! (Score:1)
I wonder who they're going to sell it to - it costs a fortune to operate!
So, it absolutely is! Got it. (Score:2)
With the numbers their disastrous game launches have been getting, it would be surprising that replacing the head of xbox wont also include massive restructuring and then selling off a sinking asset before it is entirely worthless.
It seems in all their flying too woke to the sun, they forgot they need to sell products to stay afloat and the modernaudience does not buy video games, they just want to infiltrate and culturally-colonize a pre-existing community to dictate and push their messages.
Uh oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
That is what they always say right before announcing the sale.
"It's not for sale."
...
"Welcome to our new corporate owners."
...
"We couldn't tell you because the negotiations were under NDA."
Re:Uh oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
> That is what they always say right before announcing the sale.
... or what one would say knowing that there are no bidders offering any substantial amount of money for that dead brand name, anyway.
Re:Uh oh! (Score:4, Interesting)
I think its implausible that it'd be for sale. The thing would be worth multiple tens of billions at the bare minimum because of all the game studios it owns AND a hardware division. Theres a LOT of IP in there.
But actually recoupinng any of that? Doubt it.
The XBox business just doesnt make a lot of sense.
Re: (Score:2)
Dude the Epstein class has been routinely trading companies for tens of billions of dollars. Often with little or no hope of ever making a profit. One of the reasons the economy is constantly collapsing is that the "Job Creators"can take these absolutely fucking batshit insane risks and because they are too big to fail it's always worth it. If it blows up in their faces we bail them out and they get a cushy job from their buddies and if it pans out it's a huge increase in profits and career opportunities fo
Re: (Score:2)
> Dude the Epstein class has been routinely trading companies for tens of billions of dollars.
Yes we know the Epstein class love buying companies that lose literally billions of dollars. /s Please engage your brain.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes that's one scenario. The other scenario is that people say "It's not for sale." because of speculation that someone should buy it. That's been my own experience with my employer for years, we legitimately were not interested in a sale but media kept speculating on who would buy is *if we were*.
Looking to the specifics here: Xbox has a potential to make lots of money. They did in the past. It was just their very recent actions were fucking stupid and need a correction (it's unfortunate that those correct