Asha Sharma’s Xbox Town Hall: a Billion PCs, a “Family” of Next-Gen Consoles, and a More Flexible Game Pass

REDMOND — Xbox’s CEO just gave the clearest picture yet of where the brand goes from here — and it’s much bigger than a box under your TV. In a town hall with Microsoft employees this week, Asha Sharma said Xbox has “started to return to growth,” laid out a plan to serve a billion Windows PCs, and confirmed the next generation of Xbox hardware will be a “family of devices” rather than a single console.

The details come from a transcript of the meeting published by Windows Central and reported by Pure Xbox and Insider Gaming. It’s the most candid we’ve heard Sharma since she took the job — and it reads like a course correction happening in real time.

The headline for employees: the bleeding has stopped. Sharma said growth is running at “more than 2 to 3 times what we were,” the brand is no longer declining in hours spent, and positive sentiment is up 30% over the past year. She name-checked three strong starts: Gears of War: E-Day, Minecraft Dungeons 2, and World of Warcraft: Forever.

Then came the mission statement. Asked why Xbox exists at all, Sharma said: “We exist to be where the world plays” — and that Xbox will know it’s succeeding when it reaches a billion daily active people. The strategy going forward rests on what she called the “four C’s”: core, content, creation, and connection.

The most aggressive part of the plan is PC. Sharma was blunt about the past: Xbox took a “one-shot approach” — a single app, minimal effort. And yet Battle.net’s user retention is “nearly as good as Steam’s,” on a platform Xbox barely invested in. That’s the kind of stat that rearranges roadmaps. The new plan: invest in Battle.net “the right way” for its community, keep building Xbox PC — which Sharma said is now the number one PC gaming storefront in China — and simplify publishing so developers aren’t doing the same work twice for console and PC.

Then the hardware tease. The next generation of Xbox, codenamed Project Helix, “is a family of devices,” Sharma said. “We are moving to a family of devices for Gen-10. There is not one device that fits all. We will certainly have a great console first, but we also know that many players will be on the go.” Translation: a proper console anchors the lineup, and something portable is coming — whether that’s a first-party handheld or another partner device in the vein of the ROG Xbox Ally X. Sharma added that the new operating system is “starting to look really good,” which is executive for we’ll show you soon.

For anyone worried this means Xbox is done with boxes: Sharma went out of her way to say the opposite. Xbox doesn’t have “the right” to grow beyond console, she said, unless it serves its “most valuable players the right way” — and she still sees room to grow the console audience. That tracks with her recent “Xbox is not for sale” message: the brand isn’t being wound down, it’s being re-aimed.

And then the quiet bombshell: Game Pass is about to change. Sharma said the subscription will become more “flexible” for players — and admitted the old Game Pass strategy had driven “freefall” declines on the balance sheet. Read between the lines: the all-you-can-eat era was costing real money, and the next version will look different. New tiers, new prices, new rules — pick your poison. October’s Game Pass lineup is still business as usual, for now.

The town hall caps a busy stretch of Sharma messaging. She recently walked back the GTA VI cloud-streaming exclusivity claim after it blew up, and she’s been doing the rounds making the case that Xbox has a future as something bigger than a console maker. The throughline of this week’s meeting: a CEO trying to tell employees, players, and the industry what Xbox actually is now.