Phil Spencer, the Xbox leader who spent 38 years at Microsoft and helped reshape the gaming industry through big acquisitions and a bet on cloud gaming, is retiring from the company.
He will be succeeded as CEO of Microsoft Gaming by Asha Sharma, a former Instacart chief operating officer and Meta vice president who joined Microsoft two years ago, the company said Friday.
The transition also includes the departure of Sarah Bond, the Xbox president who was widely seen as a potential Spencer successor, and the promotion of Matt Booty to executive vice president and chief content officer overseeing Microsoft’s nearly 40 game studios.
In an email to employees, Spencer said he told Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last fall that he was ready to step back, and that they had been planning the transition since then. He called his nearly four decades at Microsoft “an epic ride and truly the privilege of a lifetime.”
Spencer “expanded our reach across PC, mobile, and cloud; nearly tripled the size of the business; helped shape our strategy through the acquisitions of Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax, and Minecraft; and strengthened our culture across our studios and platforms,” Nadella wrote in a separate memo.
The longtime Xbox leader will remain in an advisory role through the summer to support the handoff. Bond is also expected to remain at the company through a transition period.
Sharma, who is currently president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product organization, has roots in the Seattle startup community, with deep experience in consumer platforms and operations, and no prior experience in the video-game industry.
That’s where Booty’s new role will presumably come in — as chief content officer, the industry veteran will oversee Microsoft’s sprawling studio portfolio, pairing his decades of gaming experience with Sharma’s operational background.
In her first message to the gaming team, Sharma pledged to recommit to Xbox’s core console fans and vowed that the company would not “flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop,” calling games “art, crafted by humans.”
Microsoft had been planning to make the announcement next week, but accelerated its timeline after IGN learned about the plans from inside sources. The gaming publication broke the news a short time ago.
