XBOX CEO Asha Sharma asked expert if brand is 'fixable'

XBOX CEO Asha Sharma asked new chief strategy officer Matthew Ball if the brand was "fixable" when they first spoke.

It's been more than 100 days now since Sharma took over the reins as CEO from Phil Spencer back in February.

There have already been a lot of changes happening at XBOX since she took over, including the price of Game Pass decreasing, scrapping old marketing campaigns and making some first-party XBOX games exclusive again, such as Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution.

In an interview with The Game Business, Ball revealed Sharma asked him if XBOX could be fixed and what his response was.

"When I sat down with Asha for the first time, she asked me: 'Is it fixable?'" he said. "I'm a strategic optimist. I think it is incredibly defeatist to think that there's any scenario that you can't do better, that you can't improve.

"I joined because what she told me she wanted to achieve, I believed was right and achievable."

In a new internal memo shared publicly, Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty shared the latest on Project Helix amid quite a bleak update on where gaming consoles are at right now.

It said: "We are currently unable to make as many [Series X/S] consoles as players want to buy and we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix."

So good news for Project Helix - but that was prefaced with a tough update on console components.

The memo said: "We are in a hardware component crisis. When I joined as CEO in February, the price we paid for console storage components was over 2x as high as we paid last fall.

"These costs have since doubled again.

"And as we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase, taking us over 5x the prices we paid only two years earlier. Memory costs have followed a broadly similar trajectory.

"While the entire industry is facing a components crisis, we believe we have been impacted more greatly than many of our peers due to the choices we made over the last half decade."

There are reports XBOX is planning for more major layoffs but this has not been confirmed by the company.

Elsewhere from Indy100:

• XBOX CEO reveals crucial Project Helix update amid 'component crisis'
• New XBOX console revealed - everything we know so far

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