#xbox-leadership-reshuffle

#xbox-leadership-reshuffle

Amazon Luna will no longer support EA, Ubisoft, or GOG's third-party stores, and it is discontinuing subscriptions to Ubisoft Plus and Jackbox Games, canceling active subscriptions at the end of the billing cycle.

Phil Spencer, the longtime face of Xbox, announced he's retiring last week. He'll be replaced by Microsoft's former CoreAI CEO Asha Sharma, instead of his longtime deputy Sarah Bond, who plans to leave the company. Will this change actually help the beleaguered Xbox division, or is it another example of Microsoft shoving AI into everything?

Spencer, who got his start at Microsoft as an intern in 1988, served as a manager and executive at Microsoft Game Studios in 2003. In 2014, he took over as Head of Xbox, guiding the company through the aftermath of the troubled, Kinect-bundled launch of the Xbox One. More recently, he helped shepherd the company's 2020 purchase of Bethesda Softworks and its $68.7 billion merger with Activision Blizzard, including the many regulatory battles that followed that latter announcement.

Microsoft seems more determined than ever to combine Xbox and Windows - to the point that its next-gen Xbox, codenamed Project Helix, will play PC games too. Today, we learned Helix will go alpha in 2027. But the company isn't waiting for Helix before it points Windows gamers in the Xbox direction. Starting in April, it's bringing its full-screen Xbox mode to every kind of Windows 11 PC, including laptops, desktops, and tablets.

The console wars died down not because any side won, but because it became irrelevant. Major games, seeking to make their gigantic budgets back, went platform agnostic. Where once companies had splurged on making consumers identify with specific console platforms, suddenly where you play games had become a much less defining factor.

The higher bitrate streaming option will let subscribers with an Xbox Series X or S, Xbox One X or Xbox One play their games at a higher resolution, provided the game and their display supports it. Microsoft previously only offered 1440p streams on select Fire TVs, LG TVs, Samsung TVs, web browsers and the Xbox PC app.