By 
Former CAA agent and game designer Seamus Blackley, who is best known for creating and designing the original Xbox in 2001, set the cat among the pigeons recently with comments over the executive regime change in Microsoft’s Xbox division.
Recently, the news came that longtime Xbox division chief Phil Spencer is exiting after several decades at Microsoft and over a decade in charge at Xbox, leaving the head of Microsoft’s CoreAI division, Asha Sharma, running the Xbox division.
In an interview with GamesBeat, Blackley suspected that Microsoft is looking to sunset the Xbox:
“Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business, is being sunsetted. They don’t say that, but that’s what’s happening. I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.
The natural consequence of the focus on AI is that AI abstracts every problem from the minds of the executives who believe in it. We’re abstracting the problem of games as well. There’s a core belief, and you can see it in what Satya [Nadella, Microsoft CEO] said, that AI will subsume games like it will subsume everything.
The job of all these people is to just gently usher all of these business units into the new world of AI… Asha is coming into games because her boss believes that games are going to be driven by AI. It’s a very different approach. ”
In the wake of that interview, Blackley has further clarified his comments. Posting on BlueSky (via Games Radar), he says he’s been asked dozens of times now “if I believe [Xbox] is dead”. He says:
“No. I love Xbox as my own flesh and blood. It’s the most wonderful thing to me. The distress it’s in kills me, haunts me. But progress requires introspection and realism. Learning is pain.
I love Xbox more than literally anyone. This is killing me. But I know a lot about organisations and business now, and I was being honest, not a PR a–hole. Let’s talk about it. It’s literally something I nearly died to bring into existence. Seeing it struggle and being unable to act is hard.”
In her official statement after her hiring announcement, Sharma said: “we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop.”
The post Xbox Co-Founder: The Brand Isn’t Dead appeared first on Dark Horizons.
