Xbox boss says future needs new games, not just old favourites

Xbox will not survive if it only relives the past. That was the warning from Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma to staff at an internal Xbox Town Hall meeting this week.

Sharma said Xbox is backing its strongest franchises and wants its great games to become great global billion-dollar franchises. The account of her remarks was reported by Video Games Chronicle, which credited Windows Central with obtaining the meeting.

She also said she wants Xbox to keep creating enduring new IP. IP means intellectual property, the characters, worlds and stories a company owns and can reuse.

“We won’t survive if we only relive the past,” Sharma told staff, according to the report. She said the company has to find new ways and courage for invention on new IP that reaches new sets of audiences.

It is a balancing act. Keep the big names going. Build new ones too.

For players, this means sequels alongside bets on unfamiliar worlds. No titles or dates were attached to the remarks.

The comments follow a difficult run for the business. Sharma took over leadership of Xbox from former head Phil Spencer. She has said Game Pass, the subscription service that offers a library of games for a monthly fee, was in decline when she arrived.

She reportedly told staff the previous Game Pass strategy sent Xbox’s balance sheet into “freefall”, according to IGN. She gave an optimistic outlook in response to the company’s fourth-quarter 2026 fiscal report, which showed a continued decline in earnings.

Xbox is in the middle of what it calls a reset. In an article titled ‘Next 100 Days: XBOX Reset’ published on 10 June 2026 and credited to Asha and Matt, the company said first- and third-party exclusives and new IP are critical to its success.

On 6 July 2026, Xbox said as part of resetting Xbox it will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realise their vision, according to Xbox.

Then in its ‘Continuing Our Reset’ update on 22 September 2026, Xbox stated that in August Compulsion and Double Fine returned to independent management with their IP, back catalogues and runway funding.

What makes this stand out is the directness. Sharma is not pitching nostalgia alone. She is telling staff the future depends on new ideas finding new players.