Xbox chief Asha Sharma has discussed her vision of the video games industry’s next 25 years, and suggested its future lies in small teams or individuals able to “wield capabilities that once required entire nations.”
Sharma’s essay, posted today on X/Twitter ahead of Xbox’s quarter century anniversary this weekend, seems to take pains not to explicitly reference A.I. by name. But in a section looking ahead to the future of the Xbox brand and video games in general, the huge role that Sharma apparently believes A.I. will play is made pretty clear.
“While modern games demonstrate the heights of human craft in ways unimaginable just decades ago, the cost, resources, and risk required to create them have grown just as dramatically,” Sharma wrote. “As a result, too many ideas never become games, and too many games fall short of what their creators imagined. For decades, this has been the unavoidable trade-off of ambition. We must change this.
“Throughout human history, the scale of what we could create was determined by the people, capital, and resources we could command. That relationship is beginning to break,” Sharma continued. “A single person will soon be able to wield capabilities that once required entire nations. A small team will be able to build worlds that today demand hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars. And our largest studios will be able to pursue ambitions as far beyond today’s games as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is from its first entry in 1982.”
It’s hard to imagine that this version of the future could be possible without the heavy use of A.I. tools in game development — a topic that is still highly controversial among video game fans, even as it becomes all the more ubiquitous behind the scenes.
For industry watchers, though, and also for Xbox employees, Sharma’s message also points to something else: a vision of game creation that’s far leaner than now in terms of financial cost and human investment. After a another year of brutal layoffs across the video games industry and within Xbox in particular, this concept will likely do little to reassure anyone currently at the games development coalface.
“I believe the future of gaming will look more like its beginning, when a small team with a big idea could change how the world plays,” Sharma concluded. “Our responsibility is to deliver great games, unmistakable hardware, and give more people the chance to make something the world has never seen.”
Sharma oversaw 1,600 job losses within Xbox back in July of this year, and laid out a plan for a further 1,600 employees to be shed over the rest of this year. This led to the company shedding several game developers — small teams — like Double Fine and Ninja Theory and reorganizing beloved studios like id Software this fall.
The 25th anniversary of Xbox is on Sunday, 15 November.
Image credit: Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
