Days after gutting Halo Studios and laying off even more workers, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma claims that the gaming brand won’t be sold off. Not yet, anyway.
Xbox’s ongoing “reset,” which includes thousands of laid off workers on top of canceled projects galore, continued last week with the emptying out of the studio based around the once-prolific Halo franchise, leaving a skeleton crew behind. But that “reset” does not include divestiture of the Xbox brand, at least for now.
“Xbox is not for sale,” Sharma said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that.”
With Xbox’s big turnover happening this year in efforts to make the brand wholly profitable again has come some serious growing pains, but Sharma said that the Xbox business was “not healthy” earlier this summer when the layoffs began in earnest.
The big round of lost jobs began a few months ago in July with around 1,600 workers across the company being let go, and it continued last week with Halo now being moved underneath the banner of Call of Duty maker Activision to let new games enter development. Those new games presumably don’t include the reported canceled remakes of Halo 2 and Halo 3.
Business-wise, Xbox has struggled for a while, especially in this generation which relied heavily on Game Pass subscriptions that never came, and a weird “This is an Xbox” marketing slogan that made the console itself feel irrelevant at times. Sharma says that these changes, including a total expected number of layoffs around 6,400 over the course of a year, necessary.
“We’ve got a long way to go with Microsoft,” Sharma said, “and we’re going to take the long-term view.”
That “long way to go” and “long-term view” presumably includes more layoffs, which isn’t fun for anyone. But it also includes the recruitment of Hideo Kojima and his upcoming PHYSINT project, plus more, as Xbox rival Sony PlayStation has stayed in lockstep with its rival when it comes to shooting itself in the foot for the past few years.
But in the end, as ever, the brand is hoping to turn profits once more under Microsoft lest the situation somehow gets worse.
