This week has been a big one for the Xbox brand. Just a few days ago, recently appointed chief executive officer Asha Sharma confirmed that Game Pass Ultimate would be getting a price decrease, and followed up that news with a new plan, focus, and logo for the future of Xbox in its new era under her purview. Now, in a new interview with Game File, she and chief content officer Matt Booty explained a little more about how they see the future of the platform and confirm that they don't yet have an answer to the question everyone is asking.
Booty and Sharma explain a little more on each of the main elements addressed in the internal memo that was published just yesterday (linked above), starting with what's meant by 'fortifying' the platform's core subscription service, Xbox Game Pass. For Sharma, that means creating a subscription service with "more players who love the subscription, that are staying longer and that are happy."
The change to make Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass cheaper, along with the removal of brand-new Call of Duty titles, is a move that Sharma and her team believe will "give us all three of those."
"We've been thinking about Game Pass in two steps," Sharma said. "One is just: let's make sure it's affordable, which we addressed. The second is: what does value look like eight years later after the advent of Game Pass and the world changing around us and the next generation coming online? And so we're exploring a number of different things."
One of those different things, we now know, is a new, cheaper tier of Game Pass that's bundled with Discord Nitro, though that has yet to be officially revealed. When it comes to the games that will be available on that service, particularly for the ones coming from Xbox Game Studios, Booty says that Xbox will look to focus on certain "fundamentals," which include "predictable cadence, robust roadmap, aim for quality."
Getting those three fundamentals right is what Booty believes will "create the conditions for the lightning in a bottle of winning Game of the Year." It's been a long time since an Xbox Game Studios-made game was actually given the GOTY crown in any kind of unanimous fashion, and the fact that players have come to expect first-party Xbox titles to always be good but not good enough for those accolades doesn't help bring players to its side.
Especially when even if an Xbox Game Studios team did release a GOTY contender, it's not like anyone needs to buy an Xbox to play it anymore, right? Well, for now, that certainly seems to be the case. Will that change in the future? Sharma and Booty were unwilling to say, at least right now. In yesterday's memo, the only mention of exclusivity came from a one-line comment where Xbox committed to "reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI, and share more as we learn and decide."
Today, in this new interview, Sharma and Booty don't add much more, with Sharma saying that they intend to "take a data-driven approach and a strategic-driven approach, and then we'll look at our principles and we'll make some calls. So we'll share more when we're ready...I want to make the right decision, not the fastest decision."
While it's good that Sharma doesn't want to rush what is such a major decision, it's one that she'll likely have to make sooner than later, whether she wants to or not. The interview also discusses how the plan for the next generation of consoles, Gen9, which we also currently know as Project Helix, is "investing in console features" and "standing up the muscle to make sure that all of our performance and reliability and quality is great."
Nintendo is constant proof that having the most powerful hardware can only get you so far. Exclusive titles are part of the features that make a console worth having, and while Sharma says the team is "investing in it as a first-class experience again," it'll be debatable, to say the least, if it is actually a first-class experience if there are no exclusives.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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