For a few hours each month, the executive in charge of Xbox sits down and works through customer support tickets. Not a simulation. Not a listening tour with a camera crew. Real tickets — the ones you file when your account gets locked or your download stalls at 97%.
The detail surfaced in a new Wall Street Journal profile of Asha Sharma, now roughly six months into the role. “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.
Run the numbers on that. If you’ve filed a ticket with Xbox since she stepped in, the odds that the CEO read it are not zero.
Six months, one very full ledger
Her opening stretch has cut both ways. She scrapped the divisive “This is Xbox” marketing campaign. She lowered the subscription price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. She also oversaw mass layoffs and development studio spin-outs — the part that never makes it onto a highlight reel.
Set against that backdrop, the support-ticket habit reads differently. It’s a modest gesture from someone signing off on very large and very unpopular calls. Whether it comes across as real curiosity or corporate theater probably depends on whether you still have a job at one of those studios.
The part worth dwelling on is what she says she took away from it: how complex it can be to fix a single player’s problem. Anyone who has ever waited in an Xbox support chat would have volunteered that free of charge.
Telling the studios to go back to what they’re known for
Sharma recently instructed her studios to concentrate on Xbox’s underserved core franchises. One outcome of that directive has fans unusually united: Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind Fallout New Vegas, has started work on a new Fallout RPG.
Directing it is Josh Sawyer, who served as New Vegas’ creative boss and carries a long track record in RPG development — about as strong an answer as there is to “who should make this.”
A franchise-first Xbox is a narrower Xbox. On the evidence so far, it’s also a better-liked one.
And then there’s Kojima
Last week Sharma put Hideo Kojima under a multi-project deal. Their previous arrangement covered only the horror title OD. The new one widens it to take in Physint, the Metal Gear Solid spiritual successor that began life as a PlayStation exclusive and that PlayStation intended to cancel earlier this summer.
Rescuing a project a rival platform holder was prepared to abandon, from a director carrying that much brand equity, says plenty about where the priorities now sit.
And somewhere in among all of it, she’s still clearing tickets.