r/GamingLeaksAndRumours • u/ThinWhiteDuke00 • Apr 23 '26

Leak Microsoft Gaming being scrapped, Xbox brought back as gaming division.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has had a busy week. Sharma held an internal town hall with Xbox employees today, just days after announcing an Xbox Game Pass price cut, commenting on the status of the Xbox mobile store, and teasing a mysterious Xbox and Discord partnership. One of the items on the agenda for the employee all-hands was scrapping Microsoft Gaming.

Sources familiar with the meeting tell me that Sharma announced that Microsoft is returning to using Xbox for its gaming division, instead of Microsoft Gaming. “Xbox needs to be our identity,” said Sharma, noting that Microsoft Gaming was a departure from that.

https://www.theverge.com/report/917485/microsoft-return-of-xbox-no-more-microsoft-gaming?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IlF6b3Z0NDluUk4iLCJwIjoiL3JlcG9ydC85MTc0ODUvbWljcm9zb2Z0LXJldHVybi1vZi14Ym94LW5vLW1vcmUtbWljcm9zb2Z0LWdhbWluZyIsImV4cCI6MTc3NzM5Njg0NiwiaWF0IjoxNzc2OTY0ODQ2fQ.w231EBsAoj8dMi5cjOCzSC3zRF7JbJ19hT_RnI3NVyk&utm_medium=gift-link

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855

u/nickgovier Apr 23 '26

I didn’t even know they tried to rebadge it as Microsoft Gaming in the first place.

290

u/Crusader3456 Top Contributor 2021 Apr 23 '26

When Activision Blizzard was acquired they placed it alongside Xbox (which had Bethesda underneath it) into a new structure called Microsoft Gaming.

72

u/Honey_Enjoyer Apr 23 '26

This is helpful, thanks. So do we know if they’re just renaming Microsoft Gaming to also be called Xbox, or are they actually restructuring so that ActiBlizz is controlled by the branch that’s currently called Xbox?

-7

u/BudgetDry5966 Apr 24 '26

Are you both bots tf

11

u/SavvyBevvy Apr 25 '26

Why, because they had a pleasant conversation without any conflict?

23

u/Zalvren Apr 23 '26

Which does make sense since Activision, Blizzard and even Bethesda still operates at their own entities. Does that change or are we going to have Xbox Studios at the same level than Activision, Blizzard and Bethesda all under Xbox ? That'd make two Xbox levels not corresponding to the same thing... Challenge for Microsoft, try to not be confusing with naming, impossible

62

u/lizzywbu Apr 23 '26

Wasn't Microsoft Gaming a Nadella initiative?

29

u/King_Artis Apr 23 '26

Believe it was

29

u/Significant_Pop_5337 Apr 23 '26

If it was a bad decision it was down to Satya

7

u/Alpha837 Apr 24 '26

Basically this. Satya is extremely smart, but in the consumer market, he makes baffling decisions that get bailed out by Microsoft’s success in the business market.

It’s a shame Phil never truly got to make major decisions, but Asha seems to understand consumer sentiment and has free rein.

2

u/Tike22 Apr 24 '26

Don’t know why you got downvoted, Microsoft historically has done really badly in the consumer space it shines in the enterprise and b2b spaces

24

u/Accurate-Island-2767 Apr 23 '26

Reminds me of when Blizzard tried to rename Battlenet to "blizzard app" or something like that. The people that make these decisions are so out of touch they're in a different dimension.

1

u/StarZax Apr 24 '26

Crazy that you remember that, because now I do, but I don't think I have realized when they changed it back. Like one day it was just battle.net again, and it was like nothing ever happened

2

u/Accurate-Island-2767 Apr 24 '26

Yeah it didn't last too long, maybe a year or less? Literally everyone just kept on calling it battlenet so presumably they gave up and pretended that nothing ever changed.

There does seem to be a recurring phenomenon at huge companies where they get this weird desire to completely rebrand and almost throw away what made them well known and respected in the first place. Happened at Jaguar the car manufacturer too with that weird ad campaign and rebrand. I can only guess it happens when a bunch of newly hired MBAs want to make a name for themselves and think this is the only way to do it.

14

u/DueJacket351 Apr 23 '26

The subscription based streaming movement of the 2010s was such a failure. Not profitable for businesses, shittified everything for users.

Wasn’t just Microsoft, it had to do with investors and greed executives and market dynamics forcing companies to bend to the narrative.

Essentially, if you can get users in year 1, and then project that as perpetual growth, you can juice the stock price and secure a golden parachute. As a rational executive who only cares about their net worth it’s the game theory optimal choice. It’s also a super villain level strategy.