The Microsoft Game Department has recently witnessed significant personnel changes: the former Xbox chief, Phil Spencer, has officially retired, the former CEO and CEO of Xbox, Sarah Bond, has left the company, and the new conductor of the Microsoft game has been identified as Asha Sharma, former CEO of Coreai Products. She will take over the entire Microsoft game empire, including the mobile games of King, the blizzard, Bethesda and so on.
Asha Sharma has a wealth of technical and operational experience: she was the chief executive officer of the distribution company Instatart and the vice-president of the works of Meta, who was responsible for Messenge and Instagram during Meta. In Microsoft CoreAI, she led an artificial intelligence team that focused on models, applications, smarts and tools for developers.
Referring to the link between AI and Microsoft may be reminiscent of the downsizing of King last summer. According to sources, part of the reason for this reduction was the rise of the AI tool. Some of King ‘ s in-house staff indicated to the media that they were actually replaced by an AI tool they helped build. Microsoft and Xbox senior Matt Butti were also newly appointed as Executive Vice-President and Chief Creative Officer, reporting directly to Sharma. In his blog, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadra, thanked Spencer for his 38-year career in Microsoft, 12 of which had been in charge of part of the game. During this period, Spencer doubled the size of the game business and led the acquisition of My World developers, the Bethesda parent company, Zeni Max, and the moving snowstorm.
In her inaugural statement, the new game manager, Asha Sharma, stated that her first task was to build a “great game” and achieve “the return of the Xbox”. Perhaps most strikingly, she referred specifically to AI when she spoke of “the future of the game”. She said, “As it develops and shapes this future, we will not pursue short-term efficiency or fill our ecosystems with soulless AI garbage. The game is, and will always be, art, crafted by human beings and based on our most innovative technological creation.” The next 25 years belong to teams that dare to build surprises, to try things others do not want to try, and to patiently hold them to the end. We did that, and I am here to help us do it again. I want to return to the renegade spirit in which Xbox was built. This requires that we constantly question everything, revisit the process, protect the effective parts and be brave to change the ineffectiveness.” The Microsoft game empire inherited by Asha Sharma is facing a decline in mainframe operations, relative stability at the end of the PC and stagnation at the movement end.
In September of the same year, the field team and the blizzard staff who operated Operation Monsters were laid off. In May 2024, Alpha Dog Games, a hand-drive workshop in The Destroyer: Eternal, was closed. Visibility was confirmed in May 2025 as the end of Mission Call: War Area Hand. In July 2025, the blizzard announced that it had stopped creating new content for Operation Monsters and reduced the number of associated staff by about 100. Meanwhile, in February 2025, King launched the first six-year, large-scale new ” Candy Card Catch Dragon ” . To date, the game has not achieved the same impact as other works in the Candy Legend series. In May 2025, Yodorf Sommerstad, a long-time leader of King, left the company after nearly 14 years in office, the last three of which were the Managing Director, who was replaced by Todd Green, former General Manager of Candy Legend.
Subsequently, in the summer of last year, King will have about 200 staff reductions as part of a major reorganization. At that time, there were reports that some staff felt that they were actually being replaced by an AI tool that they had helped build. Others revealed issues related to redundancies, a harmful leadership culture, ineffective moral teams, low morale and the mandatory use of AI.