In the event you learn Kotaku even semi-regularly, you already know that Xbox has been in a bizarre spot for a while now. And with at the moment’s information that each Xbox boss Phil Spencer and President Sarah Bond are leaving and the brand new head of the model will likely be a former Meta exec who beforehand lead Microsoft’s AI division, I believe it’s time to name it. Xbox is useless. Time of dying: February 20, 2026.
This dying is way from sudden or stunning. If something, we’ve all seen it coming for some time now. Studying the information about Xbox usually felt like checking in on somebody battling a terminal illness and whose combat wasn’t going effectively. Wanting on the countless layoffs, unattainable calls for from management, canceled initiatives, flops, video games getting ported to PlayStation, and a great deal of mismanagement, it appeared clear that in recent times, Xbox wasn’t doing effectively.
The start of the tip
If I needed to decide the second when issues actually obtained dangerous, it could be when Xbox purchased Activision Blizzard. After spending $70 billion and enduring years of authorized challenges to its efforts to purchase the Name of Obligation and Warcraft writer, Xbox lastly pulled it off in 2023. However immediately, Xbox discovered itself below way more stress to ship. Xbox was now not only a console created by Microsoft as a small facet hustle; as a substitute it had morphed into an enormous writer with an enormous suite of studios, franchises, and workers to handle. Over the following two years, all the things began to alter at Xbox.
The corporate started de-emphasizing the concept you even wanted to personal an Xbox to play Xbox video games. That is an Xbox, bear in mind? Wish to play Halo or Gears of Battle however don’t personal an Xbox? Don’t fear, the video games are launching on PC. Don’t wish to play on PC? It’s advantageous, you possibly can stream them through your telephone or TV. You don’t even have to purchase the video games, simply pay for this month-to-month subscription. When a console model stops attempting to promote consoles, you possibly can in all probability stick a fork in it.
We right here at Kotaku known as the tip of the console conflict round this time. However we didn’t name the dying of the Xbox simply then. That’s as a result of, regardless of all of the indicators, there was at all times that likelihood that Phil Spencer would proper the ship once more, as he had carried out earlier than, and hold Xbox alive.
AI and porting Halo
After which Microsoft, like all large tech giants today, started investing much more billions of {dollars} into AI. And right here was Xbox, an expensive facet challenge that by no means made the corporate a lot cash, however was costing the corporate a ton on huge offers to purchase Bethesda and Activision. That was money that might be spent on datacenters and Copilot, rattling it!
That is across the time that Microsoft started attempting to shove AI into Xbox in a really awkward style, one which felt faraway from Spencer’s stewardship of the model. In 2025, after already porting a few of its smaller video games, like Sea of Thieves and Grounded, to PlayStation and Change, Xbox did the unthinkable. It introduced plans to convey Halo to PlayStation 5, but yet one more large signal that it was throughout. Spencer would by no means promote this information on social media.
That brings us to at the moment. Xbox will now not be run by a “gamer.” As an alternative, Asha Sharma, an AI govt who beforehand labored at Meta and InstaCart and who has no online game trade expertise in any respect, has been put accountable for the model regardless of one other particular person, Sarah Bond, being seemingly the proper successor to Spencer. Sharma’s hiring has generated numerous hypothesis, with some theorizing that she’s a temp decide till Microsoft fully devours Xbox and turns it into nothing greater than an icon in your desktop that you just by no means click on. Others have instructed she’s been put in place to assist convey AI to Xbox in a giant approach, which appears very seemingly, too.
No matter why she’s been made the brand new Xbox boss, it’s now very clear: Xbox is useless. The corpse will linger round for a bit longer, however the odds of a brand new Xbox console hitting cabinets are low. I think all future {hardware} will likely be rebranded PCs, just like the ROG Ally X handheld from final yr. A sluggish dying for a console that after was big, however was sunk by tech executives who had no thought what they had been doing.
