All the way back in 2001, Seamus Blackley and his team did the unthinkable by creating a video game console over at Microsoft, and that original Xbox is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary later this year in November!
Blackley hasn't been involved with Microsoft for a long time now, but he's certainly still a fan (or at least an avid observer) of the gaming industry, and speaking to GamesBeat in a new interview, he gave his thoughts on new Xbox boss and Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma, as well as where Xbox might be headed in the future.
It's a very long interview, but the gist is that Blackley believes Microsoft is now "looking to fit everything into a generative AI model", and that games are therefore "a gen AI problem" for the company as well, hence why Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has placed the former CoreAI President into the Head of Xbox role.
"If you’re Satya, you have a hammer called gen AI and every single problem is a nail. Okay, so who do you put in charge of games? A games person? No, because in the world of Satya, everything is a gen AI problem, so you put a gen AI person in charge of games with a training model, with boot camps for her to train her like you train an AI model, to bring gen AI into a position to revolutionize games.
Whether or not you believe that’s possible, I think, is the question of whether or not you believe she can succeed in this. Whether or not you believe that’s possible is the deciding factor in whether or not you believe Xbox will continue to exist and what you believe Microsoft will do with Xbox."
The OG Xbox creator admits that the younger version of him "would be screaming about this" and he still struggles with the idea of an Xbox leader who isn't heavily invested in gaming in the first place, but that it's not impossible for Sharma to achieve success here — it just depends on "whether you believe" Microsoft's strategy can pay off.
He then goes on to share two tips for the Microsoft Gaming CEO, which we'll share below:
"If I was talking to her I would say, look, if you’re not really passionate about games, or if you can’t develop a passion for games, then you should find a way to leave this job soon. You shouldn’t do it. Because it’s harder than you think. You’re a very smart person who’s accomplished a lot in your career. You’re going to think I’m wrong, but you will discover that I’m right. There’s a long history of extremely smart people in games who have hit this wall.
The second is, if you can get the trust of the gaming community, then you can build a real business on the scale of the Microsoft AI business that will make you very powerful. But that happens if you gain the trust of the audience, if you gain the trust of the community. If you want to look for people to emulate, you look at Shuhei Yoshida. I’d tell her to go and spend a day with Shu. Go and spend a day with Peter Moore. Go and spend a day with Phil Harrison. Go and spend a day, if you can, with some of the guys from Nintendo. Find Reggie. Spend a day with Reggie. Go and talk to those leaders about how they succeeded and failed in the business. Learn from them. Don’t try to make it up on your own. Go get that data. They’re all out there. I’m sure Reggie... there’s a recently-departed executive from Nintendo who might be very interesting for her to talk to, right? That would be my advice. Go talk to all of those people."
There's a whole lot more to this interview, so it's well worth getting the full picture and reading up on his thoughts on Sarah Bond ("the person who I feel worst for"), the difficulty of not being a massive gamer in business meetings ("everyone sits around for a minute and talks about what games they love") and his belief that Phil Spencer trying to do the "right thing for games" ultimately "just wore him out".
Despite his concerns, it still sounds like Blackley is willing Asha Sharma and her team to achieve and elevate Xbox to new heights, but a big question is whether her successful career can translate to the world of gaming or not.