Earlier today, Xbox boss Asha Sharma led a Town Hall meeting at Microsoft to update employees on the state of the business, and thanks to a transcript from the folks at Windows Central, we know what she said to her team.

Sharma covered a whole bunch of topics during the discussion, including how the Xbox brand has "started to return to growth" ("more than 2 to 3 times what we were"), how it's no longer declining in "hours spent", and how positive sentiment has increased by 30% in the past year. The Xbox CEO specifically called out Gears of War: E-Day, Minecraft Dungeons 2 and World of Warcraft: Forever has having enjoyed strong starts as well.

She also outlined some interesting things about why Xbox "exists" in the first place:

"Why do we exist?" Sharma said, "We exist to be where the world plays, we will know when we have a billion daily active people, and we have a right to win because we're now focused on our fans and franchises."

Later in the chat, she highlighted the "four C's" that will lead Xbox in the future as being core, content, creation and connection. While PC remains a key focus across Xbox PC, Steam and Battle.net (the latter of which is apparently almost on-par with Steam for user retention), she's still keen to invest in console and believes there's a chance to grow in that space. In the process, the goal is to "simplify" publishing across Xbox consoles and PC.

She also apparently advised that Xbox doesn't have "the right" to focus beyond console if the brand can't serve its "most valuable players the right way."

Here's a bit about this, including a suggestion that Xbox Game Pass will become more "flexible" as well. For what it's worth, Sharma advised that the old Game Pass strategy had resulted in "freefall" declines on the balance sheet.

"Asha Sharma says strengthening Gen-9 (Xbox Series X|S) is key to this, calling out innovations like Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox's disc-to-digital program, and Xbox Play Anywhere growth. She also hinted that Xbox Game Pass will get more "flexible for more players" in the future, reiterating previous hints that users will be able to tailor exactly what types of content they want to access in the service."

Finally, there's a mention that the next-gen Xbox Project Helix console will be part of a "family of devices", with a suggestion that we'll be getting both first-party and third-party hardware in the future. More will be revealed about this "as plans develop", but Sharma specifically highlights that Xbox knows "many players will be on the go".

It's worth taking all of this with just a slight pinch of salt due to being transcribed by Windows Central's sources rather than Microsoft directly, but we highly doubt they'd go into so much detail if they weren't confident of what was said. By all means go and check out the WC article for the full breakdown, and let us know your thoughts below!