If you read My city even on a semi-regular basis, you already know that Xbox has been in a strange situation for some time now. And with today’s news that both Xbox boss Phil Spencer and president Sarah Bond are leaving and the new brand manager will be a former Meta executive who previously led Microsoft’s AI divisionI think it’s time to call him. Xbox is dead. Time of death: February 20, 2026.
This death is far from sudden or surprising. If anything, we’ve all seen it coming for a while now. Reading the news on Xbox often felt like reading about someone who was battling a terminal illness and whose battle wasn’t going well. Looking at the endless layoffs, impossible demands from management, canceled projects, failures, games ported to PlayStation, and a lot of mismanagement, it seemed clear that in recent years Xbox was not doing well.
The beginning of the end If I had to pick the moment when things went really bad, it would be when Xbox bought Activision Blizzard. After spending $70 billion and enduring years of legal challenges to his efforts to buy the Call of Duty And Warcraft editor, Xbox finally made it in 2023. But suddenly, Xbox found itself under a lot more pressure to deliver. The Xbox was no longer just a console created by Microsoft as a small side business; instead, it morphed into a massive publisher with a vast suite of studios, franchises, and employees to manage. Over the next two years, everything started to change at Xbox.
The company began to downplay the idea that you even had to own an Xbox to play Xbox games. It’s an Xbox, remember? I want to play Halo Or War equipment but you don’t have an Xbox? Don’t worry, the games are launching on PC. Don’t want to play on PC? It’s okay, you can stream them through your phone or TV. You don’t even need to buy the games, just pay that monthly subscription. When a console brand stops trying to sell consoles, you can probably put a fork to it.
We here at My city called the end of the console wars around this time. But we didn’t announce the death of Xbox at that time. Indeed, despite all the signs, there was still a chance that Phil Spencer would right the ship, as he had done before, and keep the Xbox alive.
AI and porting Halo And then Microsoft, like all major tech giants these days, started investing even more billions of dollars into AI. And here comes Xbox, an expensive side project that never made the company much money, but cost it a ton in terms of massive deals to buy Bethesda and Activision. This was money that could be spent on data centers and Copilot, dammit!
This is about the time when Microsoft has started trying to integrate AI into the Xbox in a very awkward way, which seemed distant from Spencer’s management of the brand. In 2025, after having already ported some of its small games, like Sea of Thieves And Basedon PlayStation and Switch, Xbox has done the unthinkable. He announced his intention to bring Halo to PlayStation 5yet another big sign that it was all over. Spencer would never promote this news on social media.
That brings us to today. The Xbox will no longer be run by a “player”. Instead, Asha Sharma, an AI manager who previously worked at Meta and InstaCart and has no experience in the video game industry, was put in charge of the brand despite another person, Sarah Bond, apparently being the perfect successor to Spencer. Sharma’s hiring generated a lot of speculation, with some speculating that she would be a temporary choice until Microsoft completely devours the Xbox and turns it into nothing more than an icon on your desktop that you never click. Others have suggested that it was put in place to help introduce AI to Xbox in a big way, which also seems very likely.
Whatever the reason she became the new boss of Xbox, it’s now abundantly clear: Xbox is dead. The corpse will stick around for a bit longer, but the chances of a new Xbox console hitting shelves are low. I suspect all future hardware will be rebranded PCs, like last year’s ROG Ally X handheld. A slow death for a console that was once huge, but was sunk by tech executives who had no idea what they were doing.
