Who is Asha Sharma? A closer look at Microsoft’s surprising choice to lead the Xbox business

“And the thing about sports is, if you’re good at one game, you can be good at any game. … It’s all hand coordination and eye patterns.”

That’s the starting line Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrowGabrielle Zevin’s 2022 novel about two friends who build a video game company out of nothing – struggling with the tension between art and commerce, and ultimately the challenges of low-level business operations.

This explains almost perfectly what Asha Sharma will try to do in her new role as the leader of Microsoft’s Xbox and video game business: She will need to take all the patterns she has seen as a leader within the likes of Facebook, Instacart, Seattle startup Porch, and Microsoft’s AI platform, and apply them to a world she has never played in before.

And get this: one of his favorite books.

Speaking last fall on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast, Sharma said he had been reading the novel every year for the past three years. “I really like it,” he said, calling it “a great story.”

He didn’t mention in the speed round of the podcast that it was a story about video game designers. That didn’t really matter at the time. But of course now, given the news on Friday that Sharma will succeed Microsoft veteran Phil Spencer’s 38-year tenure as CEO of Microsoft Gaming.

Xbox President Sarah Bond, who was widely seen as Spencer’s successor, is leaving the company as part of the transition.

Sharma was a surprising choice, in part because he has no prior experience in video game industry leadership, and a limited background as a gamer, which has created skepticism in gaming circles. However, he has experience using major technology platforms, the clear trust of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and faith in the power of AI to reshape all businesses.

On that last point, he was quick to offer reassurance to Microsoft employees and the wider community of Xbox gamers in his introductory memo last week.

“As monetization and AI evolve and impact this future, we cannot chase short-term efficiencies or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop,” he wrote. “Games are and always will be art, designed by people, and created with the most innovative technology available to us.”

Sharma laid out three priorities in the memo: great games above all else, a commitment to fans of the main Xbox console, and what he calls “the future of gaming” — new business models and a shared platform where developers and gamers can build together.

He vowed not to treat the company’s popular franchises as “a static IP for milk and money,” and said he wanted to return to “the rebellious spirit that built Xbox in the first place.”

His first move was to promote longtime studio executive Matt Booty to vice president and chief content officer, combining his platform background with his years of gaming loyalty.

“My first task is simple,” he wrote. “Understand what makes this work and secure.”

The challenge ahead

There is much to protect, and much work to be done. Microsoft has been gaming for decades, from early PC titles like Flight Simulator until the launch of the first Xbox console in 2001.

Under Spencer, the company made a big bet on growth, acquiring ZeniMax Media and its family of studios – including Bethesda – for $7.5 billion in 2021, and closing the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in 2023, the largest gaming deal in history.

That brought Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Candy Crush, Diablo, and Overwatch under Microsoft’s roof, making it the third largest game company in the world by revenue.

Spencer also expanded Xbox’s reach across PC, mobile, and cloud gaming, and built Game Pass into a major subscription service, revolutionizing the category’s business model.

But the financial picture was not good. Microsoft’s gaming revenue fell 9% in the latest quarter, while hardware revenue fell 32%. This segment represents about 7% of the company’s total revenue, and has faced pressure in recent years to meet aggressive profit targets.

Xbox’s challenge has not been a lack of talent or popular franchises. GeekWire games contributor Thomas Wilde noted that the biggest problem has been instability: waves of layoffs and studio closings that have left even successful teams uncertain about their future.

In his note on the transition, Nadella said Sharma brings “deep experience building and growing platforms, integrating business models with long-term value, and operating globally.”

The implications of the choice are clear: Xbox spans console, PC, mobile, and cloud platform, requiring an operator who knows how to make all the pieces work together.

That’s a job Sharma has done everywhere he’s been.

From Wisconsin to Redmond

Sharma’s career and the details of his biography have been widely scrutinized in the past few days, as the video game and business media have tried to find out who this person is, who appears to no longer want to lead one of Microsoft’s biggest consumer products.

Now 37, he grew up in Wisconsin and started working at age 17, with an early role at SC Johnson, according to a 2014 MarTech profile. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and by the time he left college he had worked at Cargill, Deloitte, and Microsoft, and lived abroad in Hungary.

As of last fall, he was a second black belt in Taekwondo, explaining to Rachitsky on his podcast that the discipline is “more mental than physical.”

He has been at Microsoft for two years, running the CoreAI product organization, the team behind Azure AI Studio, the company’s AI model catalog, and Microsoft Copilot developer tools. He was previously COO of Instacart, and before that VP of product at Meta, where he ran Messenger and Instagram Direct. He is on the boards of Home Depot and Coupang.

Less well known is that he started at Microsoft, worked in corporate and then marketing right out of college before leaving to help build Porch, a Seattle-based home services company, where he was COO in the company’s early years.

In a 2024 interview with GeekWire at Microsoft’s Build developer conference, not long after joining the company, Sharma talked about what held him back. After years of working in different types of organizations, he said the lesson he learned from his work is the importance of working with great people on important issues.

He explained that he feels lucky to be working on “one of the most important technologies in our life” at a critical time, when people are embracing the idea of ​​growth.

Victory over the players

Part of what made Spencer so popular among Xbox fans was that he was one of them – a lifelong gamer with a track record of great success and a habit of wearing sports t-shirts under blazers at industry events.

Sharma knows he cannot repeat that overnight, but he is clearly trying to close the gap.

Over the weekend, he started interacting directly with Xbox fans on social media, sharing his gamertag (AMRAHSAHSA, his name spelled backwards) and listing his top three games as “Halo, Valheim, Goldeneye” – Microsoft’s best franchise, a popular survival game, and a classic title that was first launched on Nintendo 64 in 1997.

When another fan accused his account of being run by AI, he replied: “Beep Boop Beep Boop.”

You also get community support within Xbox. Longtime executive Aaron Greenberg, the division’s VP of marketing, wrote in X that after spending time with Sharma last week, he was “incredibly optimistic about the opportunity ahead under his leadership,” describing him as “very bright, eager to listen and learn from others, without ego.”

A career history on Sharma’s Xbox profile, which IGN and Windows Central quickly broke down, shows he’s played about 30 titles since mid-January, gravitating toward narrative-driven indie games like Fire watch, I went homeagain Remainder of Edith Finch – the types of games you can play if you want to understand games as art, not just entertainment.

He opened his first achievement on January 15, almost five weeks before his new role was announced. It was a Halo: The Ultimate Collection milestone, aptly titled “Your Journey Begins.”