Xbox will 'reset' in the next 100 days, CEO to focus on affordable products and smart investments

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma plans to reset the business in the next 100 days, right-sizing investments, re-evaluating game exclusivity, and focusing on affordable content and hardware.

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Asha Sharma just passed her first 100 days leading Xbox. In that time, Sharma has roused excitement around the brand, made some hefty promises about the future of consoles and even discussed the return of exclusivity, and made radical changes to Game Pass. But it's the next quarter that will bring the most change at Xbox.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg Technology, Sharma spoke about 'resetting' the future of Xbox, giving fans an idea of what to expect moving forward. It sounds like Xbox will change what it spends money on, including which games get greenlit, and start focusing more intently on "making affordable products" in the days of the RAMpocalypse.

"With AI, memory and storage costs are going up...Just in my first 100 days it's up 50% and I think it will continue to go up. So the biggest challenge and opportunity is finding out how to make affordable products during that time, and that's what the next 100 days will be about," Sharma said.

Sharma says changes are needed with Xbox's business models:

"I don't think you can raise prices through the hardware crisis that we're seeing. So it will require fundamental change in terms of how we innovate and how we think about the business models, and how we go bring this to market."

"We've got work to do, we're not in a healthy spot, so the next 100 days is going to be about resetting the business."

The Xbox CEO also hints that reductions could be in place in order to create the starting point for growth--throughout the last 2 years or so, we've seen video game companies lay off thousands of workers in an attempt to cut costs and establish new earnings baselines to grow from.

"The next 100 days will be...look, we've done so much to revive Xbox. We shipped more in the last 100 days than we have in the last year, we've been able to reset Game Pass after an 8-month decline. It's now returning to growth and expanding retention.

"I think in the next 100 days, we have to reset the business. We need to do look at how we're investing, how we're prioritizing, change how we operate in order to return to growth, to be where the world plays."

These are still somewhat nebulous assertions, and it still remains unclear how Xbox will actually solve all of these problems. Not much has changed on an earnings level since Sharma took over, and if anything, Xbox is actually down--earnings have dropped nearly $400 million last quarter, and hardware was down to its lowest point of the entire Xbox Series generation.