Destructoid Checkpoint: The New Blood at Xbox

The gaming zeitgeist has been dominated by Xbox this week, as everyone wants to know what’s happening with the recent shakeups. Corporate life is usually enormously boring, right up until it isn’t, and with high-profile changes happening at the end of last week, it’s like folks who care about games were given a new season of Game of Thrones.

Phil Spencer, long-time leader of Team Xbox, is gone. According to the man himself, he has opted to retire. Sarah Bond, his protege and heir apparent, is also gone. New blood is filling the Microsoft veins, but people are worried about what that actually means.

The result has been a lot of stories, weird tweets, and speculation about what is happening. Let’s zoom in on acertain aspects of the story and get all judgmental. 

It’s Gamers vs. the world

Through incredibly clever sleuthing (as in someone just asked her on Twitter), Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Xbox, revealed her Gamertag, and people started to dissect her gaming history. The thing is, her gaming history isn’t very long or impressive, because she is very clearly not a gamer.

Her profile revealed someone exploring some titles for the first time and trying to get a handle on a few popular games. On top of that, it also turns out that she shares her Gamertag with other people in her household. 

Xbox’s new CEO is just not that much of a gamer, and that is absolutely fine. The idea that it takes gamers to run gaming companies needs to die. Some of the best sports teams in history were managed by people who never played, and it might shock you to learn that directors, made famous for their ability to get the best out of actors, might never have acted themselves. 

All CEOs should have in place around them a team of people who understand the many nuances of the market that they are in, and who have the ability to parse that information to each other. It will speak more to Asha’s potential failings if she doesn’t get a system like that in place, rather than whether she has finished Dark Souls or not.

Now, the kind of people who genuinely feel that a gamer should run a gaming company will likely never change their mind, and that’s okay. It’s perfectly fine to go your entire life being wrong about things that, ultimately, none of us can control. 

What’s the worst that could happen?

According to Seamus Blackley, one of the co-creators of the original Xbox at Microsoft and gaming nerd royalty, the worst that can happen is actually pretty bad. Blackley has a sneaking suspicion that, despite all the talk of bringing Xbox back to its roots, the real plan will be to sunset Xbox as we know it. 

In conversation with GamesBeat, he described Asha Sharma as a potential “palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.” That’s basically as bad as it could get for folks out there who have loved and supported the brand for two and a half decades, spending countless hours in games with friends and forming strong social bonds that last a lifetime.

It might be down to a somewhat uncharitable breakdown of Sharma’s work history. Looked at one way, you can see someone who has carried an assortment of new products and new departments to project completion. Looking at it another way, that project might just be the shutting down of Xbox as a hardware manufacturer, especially in a world where hardware costs are getting more and more prohibitive, and instead turning it into a software-focused company.  

Ultimately, Blackley considers Microsoft to be so obviously focused on transitioning into an AI company that Xbox will simply make no sense for them. Any dollar spent on Xbox could be spent on the nebulous potential of artificial intelligence instead. 

If Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, really does feel that the inevitable future of AI is that we can type in a few sentences and get a game, he might feel far more inclined to accelerate to that future and lead it than spend billions of dollars holding on to third place in the current gaming industry. 

If you can’t win, then change the rules. That might just be what Microsoft sees as its path to gaming success.

Another lawsuit for Valve

Valve has been getting some attention from the legal eagles lately, and now the New York State Attorney General has sued them for “illegally promoting gambling through video games popular with children and teenagers.”

Per a press release, they might have a point. 

“An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that Valve’s video games, including Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2, enable gambling by enticing users to pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value. In Valve’s most popular game, the process resembles a slot machine, with an animated spinning wheel that eventually rests on a selected item. The randomly selected virtual items have no in-game functionality but can be sold online for money, with one item reportedly being sold for more than $1 million.”

Loot box mechanics are a bane on gaming, and always have been. Add to that the ability to sell those items for real-world money to other people, and it was only a matter of time before a lawsuit like this happened.

Frankly, a huge percentage of the gaming business has been happy to flirt with mechanics that are either incredibly close to or straight-up emulation of well-known gambling industry tactics. That said, it’s impossible to know exactly where Valve has been skirting the line of legality, and if the Attorney General in question can actually prove that they have been.

We’ll be watching this lawsuit closely, as it could have a huge knock-on effect on how games are made and sold. 

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Destructoid head honcho Rachel Samples wishes to remind everyone that Pokémon starters can often entice, but those final evolutions can miss the mark - “What had once been a grumpy, but oh-so-cute four-legged cat became Incineroar, what can only be described as a human wrestler with a propensity for flares and fursuits. Fans were heavily split into those that loved the design and those that were horrified at what Pokémon Starters had become.”

Kacee Fay has resigned herself to the fickleness of love, and game developers - “On Feb. 26, 2026, developer ConcernedApe shared a special video celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Stardew Valley. At the end of a nostalgic walk down memory lane, he dropped the big reveal we’d all been waiting for: the two new marriage candidates arriving in 1.7, and they’re certainly… a choice.”

Scott Duwe has been on his adventures in Vampire Crawlers, and he is already falling in love with it. - “This spinoff title is, as you may guess, a first-person dungeon crawler set in the world of Vampire Survivors. It’s got the same aesthetic, characters, enemies, and leveling up process as Survivors, but with a first-person perspective and a new battle system.”

Hadley Vincent is struggling with a similar existential crisis that I went through over the 90s Double Dragon movie. What if video game movie adaptations just don’t care about us? - “I’m getting pretty fed up with recent video game adaptations. Some of my favorites have hit the big screen in recent years, and while some are hits, they fail to convey themes, emotional impact, or hold onto the artistry from the original. There are adaptations that bring new fans into an already established fanbase, while others (though gross millions of dollars…how?) seem to forget what made the original so bloody brilliant.”

And that’s it for this week!