We've already heard a lot about how new Xbox boss Asha Sharma seemingly wants to make a bunch of changes at Xbox, including ditching the "This is an Xbox" marketing campaign and reducing prices for Xbox Game Pass, but behind the scenes, it sounds like she's very keen to improve Xbox's "platform foundations" as well.
In a leaked memo to employees that was shared by The Verge yesterday, Sharma outlined that "deeper investment" is required in this area, suggesting that some of Xbox's infrastructure makes it hard to experiment, learn, and distribute at both speed and quality. Also, from a player standpoint, she says that too many of the front-end Xbox features aren't "first-class", pointing to the likes of "discovery, relevance, and social".
Here's an excerpt from the memo:
"It’s clear that our ambitions require deeper investment in the Xbox platform foundations than we’ve made before. Today we operate across dozens of surfaces, pipelines, and release models without a shared code repository or common data foundation. As a result, quality and speed too often depends on heroics instead of systems. We also lack consistent infrastructure for experimentation, attribution, and learning, making it harder to know what’s working and improve quickly. On the product side, our front end is a set of experiences built at different times, where discovery, relevance, and social are not first-class, and players have to work to find what to do next or who to play with."
In a follow-up, The Verge says that Sharma mentions PC as part of this as well, noting how she wants Xbox PC users to switch between games and devices without as much "friction" as they have to deal with today.
Clearly, the new Xbox boss believes that improvements need to be made behind-the-scenes to operate in a more efficient manner going forward, and it's nice to hear that the Xbox dashboard experience will likely continue to evolve as a result of that — her mention of "discovery, relevance, and social" not being "first-class" certainly suggests as such.
Who knows exactly what'll come of this, but it sounds like major changes are afoot behind the scenes at Xbox!