Opinion: Xbox already has a marketing team and (unless I'm mistaken) journalists are not on its payroll

I fucking knew it. I knew before I'd even clapped eyes on the latest in what looks to be a carefully curated production line of fawning Asha Sharma profiles that it would make my blood boil. But I am a reporter. There is always a chance the newly-minted Xbox CEO might let slip a few words of substance. So, down the rabbit hole I tumbled. 

That was the plan, at least. I made it 68 words into Fortune's rhapsody to Sharma, who the publication is positioning as "The non-gamer CEO racing to save Microsoft’s Xbox," before my head swivelled so hard I practically became an owl. Hoot hoot.

Here's the offending opening salvo:

"Asha Sharma returns from one of her walking meetings around Microsoft’s sprawling campus in Redmond, Wash., to her relatively new office in the Xbox building, reached via a 1,100-foot-long bridge from the main offices. It’s a brisk early September afternoon, and Sharma is wading through the next series of changes she’ll make at the legacy gaming business. There are more layoffs to complete and more studios to consolidate.

What are we doing here, folks? Why is a reporter framing the 3,200 layoffs announced by Sharma in July as a tedious inconvenience to be waded through? Like forgetting your umbrella on the way to work right before the heavens open. Frustrating, sure. But no big deal! Just another speedbump for the young, plucky CEO that could.

Next, we have this excerpt: 

"Unafraid to create tensions, the jacket- and sneaker-loving executive has come in clear-eyed and with swagger, indirectly questioning her predecessor’s strategy, and has shown a remarkable knack for marketing that plan with deftly written employee memos, new slogans, and strategic posts on social media, where meme after meme of Sharma also appear. (One deepfake video shows her yelling, “You’re all fired!” to a group of studio employees.)

Naturally, it is imperative that we know Sharma is a sneakerhead. She is just like YOU. She owns trainers. How else could we relate to the woman who has been, according to multiple Xbox workers, responsible for kneecapping studios like id Software and ZeniMax Online Studios? She also writes a killer memo, too.

Fortune eventually begins to lay out the scale of those layoffs about halfway through its lengthy report, where it also notes Sharma is planning to announce more cuts "this month (October), November, and January" according to people familiar with the matter. That's, um, pretty BIG NEWS. It probably should have been given a mention before Sharma's kicks. 

There's also a hesitancy to confirm what the entire industry—including Xbox employees—already knows to be true. "[The Xbox layoffs] could mean a loss of valuable institutional knowledge," states Fortune. Hmm. "Could." That's an interesting and depressingly generous choice of word. A cursory web search would have surfaced a bunch of well-sourced reporting that shows, beyond a doubt, those cuts HAVE resulted in the loss of valuable institutional knowledge. Wild, right? Turns out that carving through established teams like a searing hot knife through butter actually makes life significantly harder for those left behind.

In what was perhaps the most delirium-inducing sentence I encountered (a high bar to clear), Fortune also said it "identified at least one Xbox employee who was laid off but then given a chance to stay at the gaming unit." I strained so hard to make sense of that statement I had to reach for my dry eye drops (Hycosan Extra, if you're wondering). I noted this on Bluesky, but the phrase "at least one employee" is devoid of meaning and utterly nonsensical. It is the bare minimum amount of employee you could possibly identify. Were there more? Maybe—who knows!

The thing is, there is useful information peppered throughout Fortune's report. The layoffs mentioned above. The fact Project Helix, the next Xbox console, is estimated to cost between $1,200 to $1,800 without subsidisation. A few snippets about a major overhaul of Xbox Game Pass that will see users "choose features à la carte." 

There is value here, no doubt. But it's buried beneath an alarming deluge of sycophancy that tells us close to zero about how Sharma actually intends to reshape the video game division. If you're an Xbox worker reading that, what have you gleaned? More cuts are coming—maybe in a few days. One employee was offered the chance to return after being mistakenly cut loose. The next Xbox will be totally unaffordable for 90 percent of the population barring a miracle. Oh, and Sharma recently wore aviators during a photoshoot with Hideo Kojima.

Christ on a bike.

Xbox has a marketing team who are paid to make sure Sharma looks good. It is their job to create as much distance as possible between Sharma and previous leaders like Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, who kicked off the layoff extravaganza back in 2024. 

Journalism is about reporting the facts that matter. Not feeding the ego of a subject whose story has very much still to be written. Right now, Sharma hasn't done anything substantial to earn the goodwill of Xbox customers or its workforce. She has picked up where her predecessors left off. Layoffs. Studio closures. Consolidation. If Sharma and Xbox want positive press, at the very least make them work for it.

Don't even get me started on the Wall Street Journal profile published in September. Thankfully, Aftermath has that one covered.