A few hours every month, the person running Xbox sits down and works customer support tickets. Not a simulation. Not a listening tour with a camera crew. Actual tickets, the kind you filed when your account got locked or your download stalled at 97%.
That detail comes from a new Wall Street Journal profile of Asha Sharma, roughly six months into the job. “To better understand players, she spends a few hours each month responding to customer support tickets, during which she’s learned how complex it can be to fix a single player’s problem,” the paper reported.
Do the math on that. If you’ve opened a ticket with Xbox since she took over, there’s a nonzero chance the CEO read it.
Six months, one very full ledger
Sharma’s early tenure has been busy in both directions. She killed the divisive “This is Xbox” marketing campaign. She cut the subscription price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. She also presided over mass layoffs and development studio spin-outs, which is the part nobody puts on a highlight reel.
The support-ticket habit lands differently against that backdrop. It’s a small gesture from someone making very large, very unpopular decisions. Whether that reads as genuine curiosity or corporate theater probably depends on whether you still have a job at one of those studios.
But the thing she says she learned is the interesting bit: how complex it can be to fix a single player’s problem. Anyone who has ever sat in an Xbox support chat could have told her that for free.
Telling the studios to go back to what they’re known for
Sharma recently told her studios to focus on Xbox’s underserved core franchises. One result of that directive has fans unusually aligned: Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind Fallout New Vegas, has begun work on a new Fallout RPG.
Josh Sawyer is directing it. Sawyer was New Vegas’ creative boss and has a long resume of RPG work behind him, which is roughly the best possible answer to the question “who should make this.”
A franchise-first Xbox is a narrower Xbox. It’s also, on current evidence, a more popular one.
And then there’s Kojima
Last week Sharma signed Hideo Kojima to a multi-project deal. The existing agreement covered the horror game OD. The new one expands it to include Physint, the Metal Gear Solid spiritual successor that was originally a PlayStation exclusive and that PlayStation planned to cancel earlier this summer.
Picking up a project another platform holder was ready to drop, from a director with that much brand equity, is the kind of move that tells you where the priorities sit.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, she’s still clearing tickets.
