Microsoft’s Xbox chief has gone on the record to quash one of the industry’s loudest rumors: the company is not shopping its gaming division around.
In a New York Times profile published Wednesday, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma addressed the speculation head-on with a four-word denial: “Xbox is not for sale.” She followed it with a pledge that Microsoft will do “whatever it takes” to put the division on solid footing — the right partnerships, the right operating model, whatever the turnaround demands.
The timing is no accident. Since June, when The Information first reported that CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood had internally weighed spinning Xbox out of Microsoft, every layoff and studio reshuffle has been read as a possible prelude to a sale or spin-off. The same outlet later reported that both executives have since thrown their weight behind Sharma’s overhaul plan instead — but the suspicion hasn’t fully gone away, and the Times interviewer reportedly called her answer a “bob and weave.”
It’s not hard to see why the chatter persists. Xbox has always been an odd fit inside Microsoft, a rounding error next to the company’s cloud and AI businesses even after the $70 billion Activision Blizzard deal of 2023. Console sales have sagged, and the Game Pass bet — once pitched as gaming’s Netflix moment — never quite hit its mark, with subscriber numbers reportedly peaking at 34 million before sliding.
Meanwhile, the restructuring Sharma announced in June has been brutal. Roughly 3,200 jobs are on the chopping block across fiscal year 2027, a fifth of the staff already left this summer, and five studios were shut down or sold. Franchises are being moved like chess pieces: Halo now sits under Activision, the developers behind Sea of Thieves and Age of Empires have been relocated, Playground Games and Turn 10 have been folded into a single studio, and Bethesda has absorbed Obsidian.
But a company packing its bags doesn’t gut its flagship studio and start over from scratch — the kind of five-year bet that only pays off if you’re investing for the long haul. Sharma, who took over in February with a background in Microsoft’s CoreAI division rather than games, says Xbox serves 500 million monthly players and wants to push cloud gaming deeper into Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.
“We’ve got a long way to go with Microsoft,” she told the Times, “and we’re going to take the long-term view.”
Whether the market buys it is another question. Analysts keep penciling in an eventual divestiture. For now, though, the official line is simple: Xbox stays in Redmond.
Sources: Kotaku (https://kotaku.com/asha-sharma-says-xbox-is-not-for-sale-amid-concerns-microsofts-gaming-business-is-being-streamlined-for-a-spin-off-2000738651), Windows Report (https://windowsreport.com/asha-sharma-says-xbox-is-not-for-sale-denies-reports-claiming-microsoft-plans-to-sell-it/), GameBastion (https://gamebastion.com/n/xbox-ceo-asha-sharma-insists-xbox-is-not-for/522588)