When Phil Spencer announced his retirement from Microsoft after 38 years, the gaming industry braced for continuity. Instead, it got a curveball. Asha Sharma, who joined Microsoft in 2024 from Instacart, took over as CEO of gaming and reports to Nadella.
The reaction was immediate and polarised. Sharma had never made a video game, never shipped a console, never managed a studio. She only joined Microsoft in 2024, having previously been COO of Instacart and VP of product and engineering at Meta for four years, overseeing messenger. She had led Microsoft's CoreAI division for barely two years. The appointment passed over Sarah Bond, Xbox's president and a veteran of the gaming business who many expected would inherit the role.
So what does the head of one major gaming company think about all this? According to PC Gamer, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, was asked for his take. His answer was brief: Sharma doesn't need his advice. She's accomplished plenty on her own.
That's a curious endorsement, given Zelnick's own history. Before joining BMG Entertainment, Zelnick was President and CEO of Crystal Dynamics, a leading producer and distributor of interactive game software. Prior to that, he spent four years as President and Chief Operating Officer of 20th Century Fox, where he managed all aspects of the worldwide motion picture and distribution business. When he became chairman and CEO of Take-Two Interactive in 2007, gaming insiders at the time didn't know quite what to make of a private equity guy with entertainment experience but no shipping credits.
Yet it worked. Under Zelnick, Take-Two released Grand Theft Auto V, shipped Red Dead Redemption 2, and built a company valued at more than $50 billion at points in its history. The company navigated the notoriously risky business of managing a portfolio of massive franchises and demanding creative teams. Zelnick's background in finance and entertainment apparently translated.
This is the unspoken argument Zelnick is making: competence in building and running consumer platforms is transferable. The specifics of what your last platform did matter less than whether you understand how to scale user acquisition, align business models with long-term value, and handle operating at global scale.
That framing sidesteps the real question, though. Microsoft's gaming division faces revenue decline of nearly 10% in the December quarter, and console sales have slumped. The business needs both fresh eyes and strategic clarity. Sharma brings fresh perspective but carries significant reputational risk. If Microsoft's gaming business continues to decline under her watch, the appointment will be seen not as visionary but as tone-deaf, a C-suite mishap with billions in market value at stake.
Sharma herself seems aware of the stakes. Over the weekend after her appointment, she began engaging directly with Xbox fans on social media, sharing her gamertag (AMRAHSAHSA, her name spelled backwards) and listing her top three games as "Halo, Valheim, G"—an attempt to bridge the credibility gap.
The broader issue is real: gaming is both a business and a culture. Success requires reading both the spreadsheet and the room. Some leaders bring deep gaming literacy but poor business discipline; others bring execution excellence but risk misunderstanding what players actually care about. At one point, analyst Rick Sherlund of Nomura estimated the division could lose more than $1 billion for the year, suggesting the problems run deeper than any single leadership decision.
Zelnick's refusal to mentor Sharma suggests confidence in her ability to learn the business. It also conveniently avoids saying what everyone's thinking: she'll either succeed and justify the hire, or fail and become a cautionary tale about corporate boards making decisions too far removed from the product. There's no middle ground where Zelnick's mentorship would have made the decisive difference.
For Australian gamers and the local industry, this reshuffling matters. Microsoft's strategic direction shapes which games get localised, whether Australian studios receive investment, and how the platform prioritises regional content. A CEO who understands gaming culture—whether she came up through it or studied it from outside—matters for how players and developers are treated.
The test for Sharma isn't whether she has played enough games. It's whether she can run a business that makes games people want to play, and builds ecosystems where creators thrive. Zelnick achieved that despite coming from outside the sector. Whether she can replicate his success is an open question—one that, whatever Zelnick says, will be answered by market results, not declarations of confidence.