Asha Sharma says a single person is about to become far more capable. In the whole essay, she never writes the letters A.I.
The Xbox chief published the essay on X/Twitter today. It comes ahead of the brand’s 25th anniversary this Sunday, 15 November. Much of it reads like a standard birthday look back. The section on the next 25 years is different. There, Sharma describes a future of game development that’s hard to imagine unless A.I. tools are doing much of the work.
“Throughout human history, the scale of what we could create was determined by the people, capital, and resources we could command. That relationship is beginning to break,” Sharma said. “A single person will soon be able to wield capabilities that once required entire nations. A small team will be able to build worlds that today demand hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars. And our largest studios will be able to pursue ambitions as far beyond today’s games as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is from its first entry in 1982.”
The problem Sharma says she wants to solve
Sharma presents all of this as an answer to the rising cost of making games. Few people would argue with her on that point.
“While modern games demonstrate the heights of human craft in ways unimaginable just decades ago, the cost, resources, and risk required to create them have grown just as dramatically,” Sharma said. “As a result, too many ideas never become games, and too many games fall short of what their creators imagined. For decades, this has been the unavoidable trade-off of ambition. We must change this.”
The essay takes care never to name the technology that would let one person do the work of a nation. The meaning is still easy to read. Many players remain unhappy about A.I. in game development, even as studios quietly adopt it out of public view.
How Xbox staff may read it
People who work at Xbox are likely to read the essay another way. If small teams can build what hundreds of developers build today, the industry needs fewer developers and spends less money on them.
The timing is hard to ignore after another year of heavy layoffs across the industry, and at Xbox especially. In July of this year, Sharma oversaw 1,600 job cuts within Xbox. She also set out a plan to cut a further 1,600 employees over the rest of the year.
Those cuts sit awkwardly next to the essay. Xbox let go of several small teams of game developers, among them Double Fine and Ninja Theory, and it reorganized id Software this fall. Those are the same kind of small, idea-led studios Sharma’s essay describes as the future of gaming.
Sharma ended on a nostalgic note.
“I believe the future of gaming will look more like its beginning, when a small team with a big idea could change how the world plays,” Sharma said. “Our responsibility is to deliver great games, unmistakable hardware, and give more people the chance to make something the world has never seen.”