Last week’s surprise departure of Phil Spencer from Microsoft led to the promotion of Asha Sharma, who comes to head Microsoft’s gaming division after two years as president of the company’s CoreAI Product group. Despite that recent history, Sharma says in a new interview that she has “no tolerance for bad AI” in game development.
Speaking with Variety, Sharma noted that “AI has long been part of gaming and will continue to be,” before adding that “great stories are created by humans.” The interview comes after Sharma promised in an introductory memo: “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.”
Those statements seem like a clear line in the sand from Sharma against the use of AI tools in Microsoft’s first-party game development, at the very least. But what separates “bad AI” and “soulless AI slop” from “innovative technology” that humans can use to create artful games is a matter of some significant debate in the gaming world.
Many have taken a zero-tolerance approach to the use of generative AI tools in video games. When Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 studio Sandfall Interactive admitted to using generative AI for some background assets, for instance, the Indie Game Awards rescinded the company’s honors (the assets were later patched out of the game). And publisher Running with Scissors canceled a planned new game in the Postal series after being “overwhelmed with negative responses” to a trailer containing elements they said were “very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation.”
At the same time, game development luminaries like John Carmack have defended AI development tools as “allow[ing] the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.” And Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney says requiring developers to disclose their use of AI tools is as relevant as disclosing “what shampoo brand the developer uses,” since “AI will be involved in nearly all future production [of games].”
A gaming education
Unlike Spencer, who spent years at Microsoft Game Studios before heading Microsoft’s gaming division, Sharma has no professional experience in the video game industry. And her personal experience with Xbox also seems somewhat limited; after sharing her Gamertag on social media over the weekend, curious gamers found that her Xbox play history dates back roughly one month. That’s also in stark contrast to Spencer, who has amassed a score of over 121,000 across decades of play.
In her interview with Variety, Sharma cited 2016’s Firewatch as an example of the kinds of games with “deep emotional resonance” and “a distinct point of view” that she’s looking for from Microsoft. And on social media, Sharma shared her list of the three greatest games ever: “Halo, Valheim, Goldeneye,” for what it’s worth. Sharma also seems to be taking recommendations for games to catch up on; after saying on social media that she would try Borderlands 2, the game appeared in her recently played games over the weekend.
Being a personal fan of video games isn’t necessarily required to succeed in running a gaming company. Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi famously didn’t care for video games even as he launched the Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System to worldwide success in the 1980s. Still, the lack of direct experience with the gaming world marks a sharp change after Spencer’s long tenure at a time when Microsoft is struggling to redefine the Xbox brand amid cratering hardware sales, a pivot away from software exclusives, and a move to extend the Xbox brand to many different devices.
Xbox President and COO Sarah Bond, who by all accounts was being set up to succeed Spencer, also announced her departure from Microsoft on Friday, ending a nearly nine-year stint as a public face for the company’s gaming efforts. The Verge reports that Bond caused a lot of friction within the Xbox team when she championed the “Xbox Everywhere” strategy and “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign, which focused on streaming Xbox games to hardware like mobile phones and tablets, according to anonymous sources. Shortly before the launch of that campaign in 2024, Microsoft lost marketing executives Jerrett West and Kareem Choudry, leading to significant internal reorganization.
Longtime Xbox Game Studios executive Matt Booty, whose history in the game industry dates back to working for Williams Electronics in the ’90s, has been promoted to executive vice president and chief content officer for Xbox and “will continue working closely with [Sharma] to ensure a smooth transition,” Microsoft said in its announcement Friday.
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