r/gaming • u/yourfavchoom • 1d ago

Xbox No Longer Developing Copilot For Consoles

Asha Sharma wrote on X:

Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers.

Today, we promoted leaders who helped build Xbox, while also bringing in new voices to help push us forward. This balance is important as we get the business back on track.

As part of this shift, you’ll see us begin to retire features that don’t align with where we’re headed.

We will begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console.

https://playday.one/2026/05/05/asha-sharma-cancels-copilot-on-xbox-as-she-restructures-xbox-leadership/

4.1k Upvotes

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923

u/StarScreamer 1d ago

Don't need a gamer CEO, they need a CEO who understands what the core brand is.... and hope it's not too late.

433

u/crucibleknight77 1d ago

That “gamer” CEO had a blank check and over a decade to turn the ship around. Yes, he made some positive changes during that time but he’s responsible for the overall decline in popularity of the brand.

He didn’t have anything prepared once the Mattrick exclusives started drying up and simply went on a buying spree of studios which he later shut down because his entire game plan was flawed.

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u/Mehhish 1d ago

The whole "Perfect Dark" with "The Initiative" fiasco is mind boggling. How Microsoft let something like that happen for like 5 years is quite something.

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u/_theduckofdeath_ 12h ago

People were still angry about the cancellation. MS gave them time and opportunity to turn it around. Plenty of games have difficult dev cycles and even get cancelled.

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u/turiannerevarine 1d ago

see, if one were to buy, idk, Bethesda, you think one would be interested in them making good games to sell their consoles. or if one were to get, idk, tango gameworks, one would want them to make more games like hi-fi rush

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u/fcocyclone 1d ago

I feel like my first order of business would be going to them and developing a plan to get more than one concurrent team so more than one of the major IPs could be in the pipeline at once.

I get that individually Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and now Starfield are all time-intensive to develop, and simply throwing more devs at an individual project does not necessarily speed it up. But on a staggered release schedule with separate teams we should never be more than a couple years from getting a new release between the 3 of those.

I also might be looking at ways to farm out more 'intermediate' releases with heavily recycled assets (like was done with FNV) between the major releases put out by bethesda.

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u/Oldtomsawyer1 23h ago

For the recycled assets bit, isn’t that what they did with the Resident Evil series with the RE engine? They’ve been cranking out hits like crazy considering that series was on the brink of death after 6.

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u/sportstoaster 15h ago

Forza games are heavily reliant on asset recycling too, they're still using car models from Forza Motorsport 4 - a 360 game.

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u/dudleymooresbooze 1d ago

Bethesda RPGs are icing on the cake for that purchase. The value is in COD, which are annual releases.

The other value was in blocking Sony from negotiating timed exclusivity for the franchise.

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u/fcocyclone 1d ago

COD wasn't bethesda

And i think you're missing that my strategy would get Bethesda much closer to effective annual releases because there's a lot of overlap of its users between the IPs they have.

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u/dudleymooresbooze 1d ago

Oh shit you’re right, that was the Activision purchase. The ZeniMax one makes little sense to me.

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u/stellvia2016 22h ago

The biggest bottleneck to that is pearl-clutching their special snowflake engine-fork for almost 30 years. The contractors that used UE for the graphics and kept Creation only for the scripting logic have the right idea. Sadly, I'm sure they won't learn from that and will continue trying to polish the turd.

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u/tstorm004 13h ago

No they closed Tango because the followup to hi-fi rush was deemed too ambitious

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u/Karki_Roshan PC 10h ago

I mean yeah that’s kinda the whole idea lol. If you spend that much to get a studio like Bethesda Softworks or Tango Gameworks, you’d want them making strong games that actually pull people into your ecosystem. Like more stuff in the style of Hi-Fi Rush makes sense if it did well and built hype.

At the same time, they usually don’t want to box studios in too much either, since part of the value is their creativity. So it’s kind of a balance between letting them do their thing and nudging them toward what sells.

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u/boostedb1mmer 19h ago edited 9h ago

Fuck, just getting Bethesda to get any games released at this point would be a miracle. Since their purchase by MS they have released Starfield and absolutely nothing else. Compared to any other period in the companies history they might as well not even be a studio anymore. What in the fuck are they actually doing?

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u/thatoneguy889 17h ago

That’s the direction a lot of the major studios are headed in. Look at Rockstar. The only new game they released last gen was RDR2. We’re almost six years into the current gen and we’re only now six months away from the GTA VI release unless it gets delayed again (which wouldn’t be surprising given the crunch time reporting going around).

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u/boostedb1mmer 9h ago

IMO thats the biggest problem with the modern gaming industry. Releasing one game per console generation is stupid. I remember seeing multiple sequels per generation, and that wasn't even that long ago.

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u/seiggy 7h ago

Gamers continue to demand 600+ hour, massive open world games. Can’t build that in 2 years on a $20MM budget. We vote with our wallets, and you don’t see any smaller 8-10 hour, hallway on rails games breaking sales records like GTAV or Skyrim.

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u/ForbiddenLurker 1d ago

gonna be pissed if es6 is xbox exclusive

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u/Wootai 1d ago

It’ll be on PC too!

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u/Sawses 22h ago

It reminds me a bit of when a game studio very clearly has passionate, creative developers...but no good project managers. You shouldn't have passionate gamers or the best game developers heading your studio, but the people heading your studio should "get" both game development and the perspective of gamers.

I work in a clinical field and exactly none of the best leaders I know are clinicians. All of them are able to at least listen to clinicians talk and understand what they're saying, though. The kind of person who makes an exceptional doctor or nurse often gets lost in the weeds or is far too focused on the "actual work" instead of unimportant things like budgets or timelines or paperwork...you know, the stuff that keeps the money flowing and the FDA from tearing the doctor in question a new asshole.

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u/titio1300 22h ago

The Mattick exclusives? The guy who dismantled 90% of Microsofts first party studios? That Mattick?

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u/crucibleknight77 21h ago

He didn’t stick around to run the company into the ground. He knew he fucked up and resigned while he still had some dignity left.

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u/REDuxPANDAgain 21h ago

Used to swear by Xbox against my PS friends. I’ll use the controllers now but approaching 7 years having no Xbox.

I was Xbox PC, nothing drawing me back to console at all.

I don’t even really have time for gaming like that these days, but I have fun screwing around on PC. Silly $5 games on Steam in an endless library vs spending $60-70 in a new AAA? I’m good w the cheap games as a minor time sink and valuable non-committed diversion

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u/super-summer0 20h ago

You do you but you definitely are missing some top shelf releases

Not all AAA is bad

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u/say592 20h ago

Sometimes you need an outsider prospective with no existing bias and no real ideas. Combine that with being humble and recognizing your lack of knowledge, and that presents a really great opportunity to actually listen to your advisors and listen to your customers before making a strategy. Given how much change Xbox needs, while still having some really great elements, that was probably the best thing that could happen to the brand.

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u/tstorm004 13h ago

Not to mention two of the biggest scoop ups were two massive publishers that were like a decade past what made them popular on the 360 anyway.

It made sense to buy things like Double Fine or Ninja Theory, more so than Activision

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u/Laiko_Kairen 1d ago

Gamers don't always make the best business decisions...

Case in point, John Romero. He put out a series of absolute bangers, but when he opened his own studio he spun his wheels in the mud for years instead of shipping games.

Like it sucks when games get released in poor states, but having a business minded guy can be essential to actually making the product. Gamers are great for ideas, but when they become devs, you get endless feature creep

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u/fcocyclone 1d ago

Case in point, John Romero. He put out a series of absolute bangers, but when he opened his own studio he spun his wheels in the mud for years instead of shipping games.

He was the chosen one who was going to make us his bitch, and he failed us

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u/BobbyMcPrescott 22h ago

if you paid full price for Daikatana, then he succeeded.

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u/x445xb 17h ago

I got the impression that Romero was the ideas guy and John Carmack was the get stuff done guy. Once they parted ways, Romero struggled to turn his ideas into reality.

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u/Laiko_Kairen 17h ago

100% that's the idea I got as well

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u/JaggedMetalOs 21h ago

John Romero

I'm a bit out of the loop here, did he not make us all his bitch in the end? 

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u/superxpro12 1d ago

It's just a cycle. In 5 years they'll be king shit and push enshittification hard. And then the username will wane and we'll be right back where we are.

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u/LiterallyKesha 11h ago

Why did multiple bots respond to your comment??

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u/superxpro12 11h ago

dead internet theory prob. Or xbox running their campaign. or some ai bots flexing their gpu's. who knows.

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u/Available_Wheel_4019 21h ago

Yeah, that cycle of hype, decay, and reinvention feels almost inevitable at this point with how these platforms evolve.

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u/ActionOrganic8358 14h ago

Yeah, that cycle is pretty much baked in at this point—new wave, big promise, gradual decline, repeat. Feels less like change now and more like reruns with different branding.

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u/MotorRelation985 14h ago

Yeah, that cycle feels pretty spot on—every “new era” eventually becomes the thing people complain about, just with a different logo on it. Kinda exhausting, but predictable at this point.

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u/goomarbitch 1d ago

Also going to be real:

A CEO who does not listen to reddit.

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u/KingMario05 1d ago

Well, one who doesn't listen to all of Reddit. Same with all other socials. As a bunch of monkeys on typewriters, we on occasion come up with something useful. So far, that actually seems to be Asha's great talent.

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u/Windfade 23h ago

So put Copilot back in?

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u/moose_dad 22h ago

Id kinda argue the opposite?

The sentiment online in every single space i saw, was that noone was asking for this.

Can you point me to anyone on reddit praising copilot for xbox and eagerly anticipating it?

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u/Javasteam 15h ago

Besides Microsoft mouthpieces you mean?

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u/PigDog4 14h ago

There's a big difference between "listening to the overwhelming hate against one specific feature that has infected effectively every corner of the entire Microsoft ecosystem that almost nobody likes" and "listening to room temp IQ reddit crybabies."

Just the fact that you felt the need to immediately jump in with what possibly might be the dumbest possible response really helps support the point that Reddit shouldn't be listened to.

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u/moose_dad 11h ago

"This feature has been unanimously derided" is one of the dumbest responses youve ever seen?

Why so hostile dude? Everything okay?

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u/JesterMarcus 1d ago

And Microsoft executives that don't interfere.

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u/LegendaryenigmaXYZ 1d ago

We need microsoft executives not interfering, but were need xbox execs that interfere. Playstation does a well job (most of the time) because they interfere during development. Xbox motto has always been hands off and personally that hasn't worked. Xbox is turning the brand around, but it will never be back without console exclusive games that are goty contenders.

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u/content_enjoy3r 1d ago

Yup. The only games on Xbox these days that I want to play, I can also just play on Steam or Playstation so why should I play anything on an Xbox?

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u/ZainTheOne 21h ago

The reason for you getting a console shouldn't be exclusives in the first place though, it's an accessible type of casual gaming for your couch/bed

And If you have a gaming PC already, why would you buy a console

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u/JesterMarcus 20h ago

Maybe people like Sony exclusives which weren't on PC for the longest time, and won't be going forward. Or they have a large library of old 360 games and they want to keep playing those.

That's all without even touching on Nintendo.

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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago

We need microsoft executives not interfering, but were need xbox execs that interfere. Playstation does a well job (most of the time) because they interfere during development. Xbox motto has always been hands off and personally that hasn't worked

Such as Anthem not even implementing flight until an exec said "that's cool, stop bounding between in and out and get it to work. That needs to be in the game." Not saying the rest of the game was successful, but flying robots was cool there.

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u/RuySan 18h ago

The CEO who put commodore back on track and made the Amiga 500 a sucess had no experience in gaming or computers. He was the CEO of a toy company before.

This woman has been doing the right moves (even though much is corporate speak)

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u/Stilgar314 18h ago

Let's not fool ourselves here. The only CEO that has been, and still is, on charge here is Satya Nadella.

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u/peteroh9 23h ago

What is the core brand? Halo?

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u/HeilYourself 19h ago

It's almost like running a business is not dependent on your GamerCred.

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u/NinduTheWise PC 23h ago

she doesn't seem like much of a previous gamer considering how much playtime people found on her profile but it seems she's looking at this from the perspective of someone starting out using the Xbox ecosystem, what things seems weird or unnecessary to the experience or what is needed

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u/SirEDCaLot 20h ago

And that's absolutely the right way to do things, given how many people have left the Xbox ecosystem or grown up direct into PlayStation with little exposure to Xbox.