A few days ago, an interview with Seamus Blackley, designer of the original Xbox, sent shockwaves among the community.
The interview, originally published on Gamesbeat, was widely quoted by many gaming media outlets, which could not resist the temptation to turn what was basically a hot take into “news.” At that point, the vicious circle of the media echo chamber had started, and there was no stopping it.
Blackley’s big doomsaying prophecy came after the changes at the top of Microsoft’s gaming business, with Phil Spencer retiring and Sarah Bond leaving the company, while Asha Sharma took over as CEO, and Matt Booty has been promoted to Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer.
According to Blackley, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella intends to sunset “a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business,” including Xbox. If you’re wondering, that means closing them down.
He added that Asha Sharma has been put into the position to be “a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.”
The big problem, in his view, is that Asha Sharma doesn’t have a big gaming background, and Blackley compared that to “putting a major motion picture studio into the hands of somebody who didn’t like movies, or a major record label into the hands of somebody who’d never seen a live show.”
Of course, that’s already a pretty disingenuous equivalence, because not being a gamer doesn’t necessarily mean not liking games, or having never seen a game, but let’s move on.
Throughout the interview, Blackley says a lot of words, many of which are pretty much theorycrafting based on what he thinks of a company and an executive he has no up‑to‑date visibility into.
Unfortunately, the potential shock effect of having someone say that Xbox is going the way of the dodo (again, as Blackley certainly isn’t the first, and he won’t be the first to be proven wrong) was too juicy an opportunity for many websites and influencers to ignore, so we saw this opinion ricochet across the internet like a vintage superball, gaining artificial and undue credibility with every article.
The problem, of course, is that the idea that Microsoft wants to sunset Xbox is complete nonsense.
While the company has definitely invested much in AI, it has also invested plenty in gaming. Last quarter, it generated 7.4% of Microsoft’s total revenue, which is definitely not insignificant. We’re talking about several billion dollars, which Microsoft isn’t going to just drop because AI is the big topic in 2026.
The big red flag in some people’s minds is that Sharma worked for a whopping two years at Microsoft as the president of the CoreAI product, and as such, she must be in the role to devour and consume everything that isn’t AI… despite the fact that she very much shot down that idea in her first statement in the new role.
Yet, almost on cue, the counterargument that Blackley brings up is that it’s just a corporate lie that people commonly say when they enter the gaming industry from other fields. Of course, Sharma would lie. In Blackley’s view, she’s just a corporate suit and not a straight-shooting “renegade” as he believes himself to be.
This whole conspiracy theory (because that’s what this is) is basically entirely based on the idea that everyone involved is lying to us.
According to this doomsday prophecy, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is lying through his teeth when he says that he’s strongly confident in gaming and its role at the center of Microsoft’s consumer ambition.
Asha Sharma is lying when she promises great games and the return of Xbox, and when she vows that her first job is to understand what makes it work and protect it. She’s also lying when she explicitly says that she will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop.
Phil Spencer is lying when he says that he worked with Nadella to ensure that the transition would bring stability and strengthen the foundation he has built.
Matt Booty is lying when he vows to support the teams and leaders Microsoft has in place and to create the conditions for them to do their best work, or when he clarifies that there are no organizational changes underway for Xbox’s studios.
Over all these alleged lies, we should believe the “renegade” Seamus Blackley, who believes Microsoft wants to throw everything into the recycle bin, because AI.
Interestingly, he says that “It would have been shocking if they had somebody in there in a meaningful role who was passionate about games and about the creator-driven business of games.”
That is certainly an interesting statement, because Matt Booty has spent the past 30 years, of which 16 were at Microsoft, championing exactly that.
It’s pretty telling that he doesn’t mention Booty once in the interview, as if he did not exist or he wasn’t relevant. Last time I checked, the Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer is pretty damn relevant in a gaming company.
Booty has been a constant presence in the gaming landscape for the entire gaming career of most of us. The same can’t exactly be said about Blackley, who did play a major role in the creation of Xbox in the brief period he worked at Microsoft, but pretty much hasn’t done anything else of relevance in the industry since.
Seeing Sharma’s two-year stint as an AI executive as an indication that she’s all about AI is dreadfully superficial. It ignores the fact that she spent the previous ten-plus years as an executive who built up companies and platforms that had nothing to do with AI, with a reputation as a driver for growth who supported and pushed her teams to make things happen.
Someone looking at her career logically would see that Nadella and Spencer thought about her for the role exactly because of that reputation, because that’s the kind of leadership that Xbox needs.
Don’t get me wrong. A background in gaming isn’t irrelevant. It’s definitely a nice asset for someone who wants to lead a gaming company. Yet, the gaming industry is full of successful companies led by people who aren’t gamers.
The critical component for these executives isn’t gaming, but the fact that they are ready and willing to listen to those under and around them who do have a gaming background, and to what their customers want. Some of them took up gaming after they became gaming executives. It’s never too late.
Sharma may not have an extensive gaming background, but she is supported by Booty, who has one of the most exceptional and rock-solid gaming backgrounds in the industry, and from what we hear from them, she has her eyes and ears well open.
It’s challenging to predict the effect of this combination before we see them in action, but she’s bringing a success-minded drive and youth, while he comes with massive experience specific to the gaming industry.
It certainly doesn’t appear to be a pair that one would pick to be “a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.” It absolutely looks like a combination designed to drive success with new ideas while grounded by experience, which is pretty much the opposite.
Even if Nadella was so focused on AI at the expense of everything else, as Blackley alleges, why in the world would he have parked his shiny new AI executive in a different, unrelated business to work as a palliative care doctor? It makes absolutely no sense.
While the conspiracy theory is easy to counter, its viral spread exposed a large problem, not with Xbox or Microsoft, but with today’s gaming journalism.
Websites desperate to fill content quotas and hungry for manufactured SEO relevance don’t hesitate to spread outlandish and irrelevant takes that instantly turn into misinformation. The same goes for YouTubers eager to forage into the ever-murky algorithms that encourage negativity and controversy.
When faced with the inability to access the actual executives involved in this changing of the guard, the press digs all the way to the bottom of the barrel to find someone, anyone willing to tell them something about it.
This results in what I call the carnival of the formers. Every time something happens in the industry, you’ll see a parade of interviews of former executives eager to reaffirm their relevance by dropping hot takes.
Don’t get me wrong, former executives certainly can offer interesting insight on many topics. There’s plenty of space in this industry for retrospective journalism that sheds light on what happened ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.
Yet, the more these executives are removed from today’s gaming industry because they have not worked in it for quite some time, the higher the temperature of the takes climbs, often all the way to the outlandish and irrelevant.
In this specific case, Blackley has worked at Microsoft for four years, parting ways with the company in 2002. Since then, he has not held any relevant position in the gaming industry that would grant him insight into the inner workings of Microsoft or Xbox.
The executives he has worked with at Microsoft are entirely different from the current team. He never had a meaningful working relationship with Satya Nadella, who certainly isn’t Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, who were CEOs when Blackley worked on the original Xbox.
To mention something close and dear to our hearts, under Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise was inexplicably abandoned after nearly three decades of successful history.
Satya Nadella greenlit its return when everyone thought it was dead and buried, and under his tenure, it flourished and expanded to heights that it had never reached before. Bringing back a previously killed franchise within a genre that had become a small and shrinking niche was an extremely risky proposition, and it certainly shows the massive difference between Microsoft’s executive team in the early 2000s and in the 2020s.
Despite this, Blackley believes that he has the insight to predict what Satya Nadella is aiming for and why he placed Asha Sharma at the head of the gaming business, completely ignoring Matt Booty because his appointment didn’t particularly fit the narrative.
That being said, what Blackley believes isn’t really the problem. The internet is full of people who believe they can predict what Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo will do.
The problem is that many within the gaming press decided that his opinion, 20-plus years removed from today’s Microsoft, was relevant enough to be fed to readers and gamers, or more probably, they knew that it’d have generated controversy and traffic, and as such, it was published regardless of relevance.
Even worse, the vast majority of the articles featuring that opinion certainly don’t go out of their way to underline or even mention the fact that Blackley has worked at Microsoft for a very short time and has been away from the company and any relevant position in the gaming industry since way before many of their readers were born.
They just qualify him as the “Xbox Founder” or “Xbox Co-Creator” without further clarification. That’s not unsurprising, as such clarification would basically tell readers rather explicitly “hey, we’ve just wasted your time and insulted your intelligence, but thanks for the click.”
Of course, most readers don’t really think the gaming websites they read would deceive them, so they don’t go out of their way to Google who Seamus Blackey is, which would lead them to find out the limitations of his authority on the topic.
As a result of that lack of the most basic contextual framing, which should be the bare minimum due diligence in every article quoting anyone’s opinion, many of these readers are led to believe that Blackley’s doomsday prophecy may have merit, and this is how misinformation is born.
This misinformation then gets injected out of context into social media and YouTube commentary and hammered until it becomes truth in the minds of many people. The damage is done, but hey, media outlets desperate to appease the algorithm got the traffic they wanted, and they can happily move on to the next manufactured controversy.
Of course, this is not an isolated case. Hot takes from people with no qualifications or insight are ping-ponged around by the gaming press without the relevant context rather often, and the stream of misinformation continues to flow in the name of cheap commentary, desperation for engagement, and filling article quotas with hot air.
We don’t know whether Asha Sharma and Matt Booty will be successful in steering Microsoft’s gaming business and Xbox to greater heights; no one here has a crystal ball, but unfortunately, many now believe they’re “palliative care doctors,” which is completely nonsensical.
While the future of Xbox is something we’ll have to wait for and see, the professional bankruptcy of a large area of the gaming press is a clear and present problem in front of us, right now.
