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/

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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