Asha Sharma ‘has been personally responding to Xbox users’ support tickets’
The Xbox CEO reportedly spends hours every month personally solving player issues
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has reportedly been personally responding to player support tickets, in an attempt to better understand the issues facing Xbox users.
That’s according to a new profile of the executive published by The Wall Street Journal, which claims that Sharma has been spending “hours every month” solving player support tickets.
The publication claims the process has helped the CEO learn “how complex it can be to fix a single player’s problem.”
Asha Sharma has had an eventful start to life in charge of the Xbox brand since her appointment earlier this year. So far, her reign has seen popular policy changes around exclusivity and Game Pass pricing, but also thousands of layoffs and warnings around the business’s future.
In July, the exec enacted sweeping layoffs across the Xbox business, initially impacting 1,600 jobs and stretching to 3,200 by the end of Microsoft’s business year.
Sharma’s plan to return Xbox to growth and “reset” its business has also seen it cut ties with numerous Xbox-owned studios – Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions have now returned to becoming fully independent studios, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have “entered terms to join new ownership”.
Prior to becoming Xbox CEO earlier this year, Sharma served as president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product. She also worked at Facebook as VP Product & Engineering for its Messenger and Instagram Direct products.
Posting on X last month, Sharma stated that while Xbox saw new players trying its services for the first time in the past financial year, that hasn’t yet resulted in notable growth, but that the expectation was that the company would start seeing ‘growth’ again by the end of FY2027 (which ends June 30, 2027).
“In FY26, over 200 million new players came to Xbox and our games, but our business did not grow with our audience,” Sharma stated. “We need to close that gap by investing in what players value. That will take time, but we expect to return to growth by the end of FY27.”
