Type Message Boards

Forum Xbox Series X

Topic Analyzing Asha's First 220 Days

Message We are like 220 day's into Asha and I think what she is doing is actually pretty obvious now which is funny because Phil Spencer spent like ten years making Xbox less and less obvious until after $80 billion in acquisitions the official answer to “why should I own an Xbox” was basically “you don’t have to :) your Samsung TV is an Xbox :)” which is incredible, like imagine McDonald’s spending $80 billion buying farms and restaurants and then the CEO comes out and says actually you do not need to eat at McDonald’s and food itself is McDonald’s, that was basically late Phil, pure Gen X management where nobody is allowed to say no and every studio gets autonomy and vibes and beanbags and meanwhile Asha seems to have shown up with the intellectual sophistication of a moderately angry regional manager and started asking extremely dangerous questions like what does this studio actually make, why do we own it, why is Todd taking nine years, why is Obsidian not making Fallout, why are there two enormous Forza bureaucracies, why is Rare treated like the Ark of the Covenant because they made Donkey Kong Country thirty years ago, etc. There is some higher-order portfolio rationalization going on here but at street level it is basically Woman Enters Room, Notices Mess. The first tranche is killing the Spencer ontology where Xbox was a console except actually no it was a service except actually it was Windows except it was Game Pass except every screen was an Xbox and exclusives were apparently some embarrassing relic practiced by lesser civilizations, meanwhile Sony just kept making PlayStations and Nintendo kept making Nintendo games because they are Provincial peasants who had not reached Phil’s higher state of consciousness where the best way to sell an Xbox was to explain that nobody needs one. Now suddenly Booty is talking about differentiation and reasons to be an Xbox fan again which is basically corporate language for “we may have made a catastrophic category error here.”

Then there is Todd and this is the part I enjoy most because Asha seems to be showing Todd who is Boss without technically showing Todd who is Boss, because obviously Todd Howard is still Todd Howard, Bethesda is still Bethesda, Skyrim has sold roughly nine copies to every household on Earth and you cannot just walk into his office and tell him he is a Loser, but you CAN alter the organizational topology until Todd wakes up and finds that the things he spent years not doing are somehow happening anyway. Elder Scrolls VI had become less a game than a prophecy handed down by monks, Fallout was something Todd would maybe get to after he finished looking at rocks in Starfield, and Obsidian literally made New Vegas and Microsoft owns Obsidian AND Bethesda and somehow for years the idea of Obsidian making Fallout again was treated like you had suggested giving nuclear launch codes to a raccoon. Now Obsidian is doing Fallout, Fallout 5 exists in some form, Bethesda is suddenly talking like Elder Scrolls VI is a videogame that may actually ship before the heat death of the universe, and Obsidian is sitting under Bethesda which is hilarious because Todd still technically has the kingdom but there are now federal troops at the train station. This is corporate domination at its finest because nobody even has to say Todd lost, you just move three boxes on PowerPoint and suddenly Todd has company.

Anyway then she starts making the assets do obvious shit. Obsidian makes RPGs, wow maybe let them make Fallout instead of another seven-year adventure in which 14 people on ResetEra explain why the combat is secretly good. Rare gets shoved under Activision because at some point “Rare is special” has to collide with “Activision actually ships games.” Halo starts getting dragged closer to the Activision industrial machine because Halo being spiritually important does not mean anything if every new Halo production cycle resembles rebuilding the Hoover Dam. Playground and Turn 10 getting pushed together is even funnier because normal people already thought they were the same company, like imagine explaining to your uncle there are actually two separate Microsoft empires devoted to Forza and both require executives and HR and meetings and separate PowerPoints. Under Phil every studio was a sacred culture. Under Asha it seems to be okay you make cars, you make cars too, congratulations you are now Car Guys.

The slightly higher-IQ layer is that she is treating studios as a portfolio instead of Pokémon. Phil collected studios and apparently once acquired they had to remain inside Microsoft until the Second Coming because admitting one no longer fit would mean the acquisition strategy was imperfect, which is not allowed in Gen X Dad Management, whereas Asha seems perfectly happy to say sell this one, merge that one, move these people, maybe close this, who cares. Compulsion can go, Double Fine can go, Undead Labs can go, Ninja Theory is not permanently protected because Hellblade had 8K pores and a Scandinavian woman whispering into headphones, Arkane is not automatically sacred because a certain kind of forum poster owns Dishonored art books, and there is no metaphysical law requiring Microsoft to own every studio Phil once hugged. This is capital allocation, which is Finance Scumbag language for stop paying for random crap forever.

Then there is Booty and I am not saying Matt Booty is literally afraid because I do not know Matt Booty, maybe he sleeps like a king in a giant Forza racecar bed, but Booty is Afraid spiritually. Every time Asha moves something Booty has to come out with another “Team,” email explaining why Rare is over here now and Obsidian is over there and Halo has Activision guys and the Forza twins are being fused and somebody got sold and somebody may close and Todd’s borders just changed again and Kojima needs another billion dollars to film a trailer of a hand opening a door. At this point seeing an email from Asha probably gives him the same feeling a medieval villager had when he saw riders approaching on the horizon.

And that is basically why Phil’s Gen X legacy is in tatters because his big idea was that Microsoft had enough money to avoid tradeoffs, everybody could stay special, everybody could keep their own kingdom, Game Pass could subsidize whatever, exclusives could disappear, nobody needed to be killed, Xbox did not even really need to mean Xbox anymore because the ecosystem would solve everything. Asha seems to believe, much more stupidly and therefore maybe much more correctly, that choices exist. Some studios matter more. Some franchises need to get the hell out the door. Some org charts are idiotic. Some things should be sold. Some people should work together. Xbox probably needs games that make people buy Xbox. Todd can be told to hurry up and will survive. Activision maybe knows how to manufacture videogames. Kojima gets moon money. Booty writes the email.

Phil built the empire. Asha walked into it, looked around for ten minutes and said why are there six kitchens and no food.

Posted 13 minutes ago (2026-10-01 17:11:21)

Posting User Mankind

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