Outgoing Xbox leadership Phil Spencer was a prolific gamer and achievement collector. How will his successor compare?
I’m not going to lie or beat around the bush about it. When somebody tells me they’re an Xbox gamer, I ask for their gamertag and then snoop through their achievement lists. How much gamerscore do they have? Did they rack it up with the easy achievement games that only take a couple of minutes, or have they been in the trenches getting Seriously 4.0?
So when newly named Xbox CEO Asha Sharma shared her gamertag on Twitter this afternoon. Well. I had to check it out for myself.
What games did Asha Sharma play on Xbox?
When I opened Sharma’s Xbox gamercard, she was actively playing Borderlands 2. An odd place to start in the series, as there are no other Borderlands games on her card, but hey — we all play our own way. At 59 minutes of play time, Sharma had unlocked 10 gamerscore via a secret achievement, fired 342 shots, and landed 30 in-game kills to reach a max level of . . . 2.
It turns out that her decision to start Borderlands 2 came from feedback on Twitter, where Sharma asked what people’s top 3 games were. Somebody suggested Borderlands 2, and she said she would start it today. And she did. Kudos for keeping her word.
Current play session aside, I dipped further back into her player history to see what else Sharma had been up to. My own Xbox account highlights my play history leading back 16 years and covers thousands of games. Former Xbox leadership Phil Spencer, whom Sharma was succeeding, was a prolific collector of achievements with a rich gamercard that was a popular subject of discussion among Xbox communities.
Scrolling to the bottom, Sharma’s very first achievement was unlocked in The Master Chief Collection and was the aptly titled “Your Journey Begins” on January 15 of this year. From there, she unlocked a variety of achievements across Halo CE, Halo: Reach, and Halo 2 multiplayer.
Altogether, she completed 16 missions and played Halo for 13 hours and 3 minutes. She would later spend 18 hours in Halo: Infinite and list Halo as one of her top 3 games of all time on Twitter, though she doesn’t specify which Halo was to her liking.
Her next game was Cities: Skylines – Remastered, which she spent a whole 12 minutes with and unlocked zero achievements.
Minecraft fared better, where she at least opened her inventory and broke 10 blocks in the 2.5 hours that she played. Admittedly, she had more achievement success in Minecraft for Windows and Minecraft for iOS, where she managed to unlock 50% and 15% of the achievements, respectively.
Mega timesink games like Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo IV, and Forza Horizon 5 all found their way to Sharma’s gamer card. But her highest achievement completion percentages were mostly in short-burst indie darlings. She completed Firewatch to 100% on January 20. Titles like What Remains of Edith Finch, Gone Home, and A Short Hike also had higher completion ratings, indicating Sharma may have a preference for emotionally charged narrative games. Charming city builder, Townscaper, was another quick burst completion.
Notably absent from Sharma’s play history is Xbox’s largest franchise, Call of Duty. She did dip her toes into EA Sports’ Madden NFL 26, though only for a whole 2 minutes, leaving it as the shortest played game on her card.
Xbox player history serves as community street cred
Xbox’s achievement system is a unique tabulator of player history. Unlocked achievements tell us the game, the time, and the task that was completed to unlock them. But it can be an incomplete record that doesn’t tell the full story.
Xbox profiles have gotten better at tracking little details like play time and specific non-achievement accomplishments. However, like many other social features on the Xbox ecosystem, it’s up to developers to implement those trackers.
Many don’t bother, either because they feel it is insignificant to the game experience, their team doesn’t have the resources to properly implement the extra details, or maybe Xbox’s support doesn’t let them know it’s something they can even do. We’ll probably never know why some devs put more into achievements and player card details while others seemingly gloss over them entirely.
But the details that are there can lend credibility to somebody who is positioning themselves as a leader in gaming. There’s no doubt that Sharma and her team realized how important it was for her to have a play history and to show that she has an interest in the games that she will now have a fundamental role in developing in her time as Xbox CEO.
The problem is that the details also don’t lie, and it can look just as shaky that Sharma’s history is so new as it would have if she didn’t have a gamertag to share publicly at all.
It could be easy to shrug and just say, “Asha Sharma’s player card details don’t matter. Microsoft is a business, and its primary purpose is money,” and that would realistically be accurate.
But for the community that supports Xbox, the illusion that the people with the power to decide which of the games we love get to see the light of day and which of our favorite studios get kicked to the curb is at least somewhat invested on a personal level, does matter.
Phil Spencer has left behind a legacy as a dyed-in-the-wool gamer who was actively involved with the games that he made decisions about. Love or hate the guy, he at least propped up that illusion. Spencer’s proclivity for pairing gaming t-shirts with blazers on the world stage at events like E3 and The Game Awards, his habit for hiding teasers in his video backgrounds, and willingness to lean into feedback from the community all aided Spencer in his efforts to turn around Xbox’s flailing brand image.
Sharma has shown a willingness to engage with the community, having been fairly active on social media these last two days. But her responses have drawn ire and accusations that they are AI-generated. It’s likely that there was some hope that sharing a gamertag with a collection of achievements would help solidify her as ‘worthy’ of being the CEO of Xbox.
Shaping the future of Xbox with limited experience of its past
At the end of the day, Sharma inevitably faces an uphill battle when it comes to public opinion of her new role, due in no small part to her previous position in Microsoft’s AI division. Sharma’s initial statements in her new leadership position were quick to highlight that the future of Xbox is human creativity, not soulless AI slop.
And I want to believe her.
Satya Nadella is seemingly desperate to leave behind a legacy as one of the forefathers of the AI future, and his determination to push AI into every tendril of Microsoft no doubt played a role in Sharma’s ascension over more notable gaming figureheads. But now Sharma is in a tough position to create a future for a brand that she has no real history with.
I’m optimistic to a fault, and I want to appreciate that, at least at a surface level, there’s some effort involved to make it look like Sharma is interested in the games she’s now over. But I’m also, admittedly, not sold on the illusion at this time.
Does Asha Sharma’s limited gamer history impact your opinion on her potential as Xbox leadership?
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