After a disastrous series of events dating back to the launch of the Xbox One and repeated entreaties from us to lay off a single person instead of thousands, somebody has finally taken the hint: Phil Spencer. The Xbox boss is retiring from his job at Microsoft, a wannabe AI company whose various chunks are precariously held together by increasingly enshittified vestigial tentacles, and being replaced by… the current president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product. It’s unlikely that things will get better from here on out, but it’s not like we’re sad to see Spencer go.
“Last fall, I shared with Satya [Nadella] that I was thinking about stepping back and starting the next chapter of my life,” Spencer wrote in a memo to staff published today by IGN. “From that moment, we aligned on approaching this transition with intention, ensuring stability, and strengthening the foundation we’ve built. Xbox has always been more than a business. It’s a vibrant community of players, creators, and teams who care deeply about what we build and how we build it. And it deserves a thoughtful, deliberate plan for the road ahead. … I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built together over the last 25 years, and I have complete confidence in all of you and in the opportunities ahead. I’ll be cheering you on in this next chapter as Xbox’s proudest fan and player.”
Instead of staying on and assuming Spencer’s role, as many assumed she eventually would, Xbox president Sarah Bond is resigning, which sure is conspicuous! Asha Sharma, who spent years at Instacart and Meta before taking up the aforementioned AI job at Microsoft, promises her appointment somehow won’t lead to more AI slop from a company that seems determined to foist AI on every sector imaginable.
“As monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop. Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us,” Sharma wrote in her own memo to staff, adding that Microsoft plans to “recommit” to Xbox fans and players, but also that Xbox, conceptually, is still kinda, you know, whatever. “Gaming now lives across devices, not within the limits of any single piece of hardware. As we expand across PC, mobile, and cloud, Xbox should feel seamless, instant, and worthy of the communities we serve. We will break down barriers so developers can build once and reach players everywhere without compromise.”
In his wake Spencer leaves a smouldering swathe of games industry destruction which is not solely his burden to bear – Microsoft employs other execs as well, after all, and also has a board and bloodsucking shareholders to satisfy – but for which he should have suffered significantly more consequences than he did. During Spencer’s tenure, Xbox made a series of ruinously bad bets on everything from console naming schemes to Game Pass uprooting the traditional model of how games are purchased and becoming a bonafide Netflix competitor.
In service of this, the tech behemoth unhinged its rotten maw and swallowed up dozens of video game studios, including all of Activision Blizzard, which cost Microsoft an eye-wateringly gargantuan $68.7 billion. Many studios have since been closed or fallen victim to one of multiple rounds of mass layoffs that ultimately impacted thousands of workers. Resulting brain drain has been immense, and thanks to the actions of Spencer and others at the highest echelons of power at major companies, the video game industry may never fully recover. Unions, a silver lining of Spencer's time in charge, are doing their best, but have frequently found themselves in damage control mode so far.
It might be hard to remember now, but once upon a time, not all that long ago, press and fans ate up Spencer’s smirking “just another average gamer” act, lauding him for putting hundreds of hours into Xbox releases large and small. If nothing else, he was determined to portray himself as a man of the people, proudly announcing that he’d spent the equivalent of 23 work weeks playing games in 2023 alone before dropping to a paltry 17 in 2024. At least now he’ll have more time for his true passion, which is obviously not keeping people gainfully employed.
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Luke Plunkett
