After nearly 40 years at Microsoft, Xbox chief and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is leaving the company, along with Xbox president Sarah Bond. Spencer’s retirement was announced in a memo from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on February 20th, stating, “Last year, Phil Spencer made the decision to retire from the company, and since then we’ve been talking about succession planning.” 

Last summer, Microsoft responded to rumors of Spencer’s retirement, saying at the time that he was “not retiring anytime soon.” Microsoft’s CoreAI president, Asha Sharma, will be moving into Spencer’s former role as Microsoft Gaming CEO, while Matt Booty is being promoted to EVP and chief content officer. 

Follow along below for the latest updates on Microsoft’s Xbox leadership changes

• Read Xbox president Sarah Bond’s memo about leaving Microsoft.
• Microsoft says today’s Xbox shake-up doesn’t mean game studio layoffs
• Xslop?
• Read Microsoft gaming CEO Asha Sharma’s first memo on the future of Xbox
• Read Xbox chief Phil Spencer’s memo about leaving Microsoft
• Xbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft
• Sarah Bond is leaving Xbox

Xbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft after nearly 40 years at the software giant. Xbox president Sarah Bond is also leaving Microsoft, in what is a major shake-up to the management of Xbox and Microsoft's gaming efforts. Asha Sharma, currently president of CoreAI product, is taking over as CEO of Microsoft Gaming.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Phil Spencer's retirement in a memo to all Microsoft employees today. "Last year, Phil Spencer made the decision to retire from the company, and since then we've been talking about succession planning," says Nadella. "I want to thank Phil for his extraordinary leadership and partnershi …

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Bluepoint Games, an American studio specialising in remakes like the God Of War Collection, the Ico & Shadow Of The Colossus bundle, Uncharted Collection and Demon's Souls, has been shut down by Sony after five years of ownership, during which time the company did not release a single remake, with Bloomberg reporting that "roughly 70 employees will lose their jobs" as a result.

Having worked closely with PlayStation for over a decade (the God of War Collection was released in 2009), Sony decided to buy Bluepoint in 2021 and bring them in-house, after which they were promptly...set to work as a support studio on God of War Ragnarok, before then being assigned a live-service God of War game, before that project was cancelled in January 2025.

And today they're done. The studio, first founded in 2006, will be shut down next month. In an internal email sent to PlayStation staff (shared on resetera), Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst says:

...we're operating in an increasingly challenging industry environment. Rising development costs, slowed industry growth, changing player behavior, and broader economic headwinds are making it harder to build games sustainably.

To navigate this reality, we need to continue adapting and evolving. We've taken a close look at our business to ensure we're delivering today while still well-positioned for the future. As a result, we will be closing Bluepoint Games in March.

This decision was not made lightly. Bluepoint is an incredibly talented team and their technical expertise has delivered exceptional experiences for the PlayStation community. I want to thank everyone at Bluepoint for their creativity, craftsmanship, and commitment to quality. Where possible, we will work to find opportunities for some impacted employees within our global network of studios.

I have seen some gross acts of mismanagement in my time covering this industry--it feels like the last three to four years have been nothing but--yet this one somehow feels like the worst. Bluepoint was a studio with a very clear speciality and a very successful track record: they took old PlayStation hits, gave them an update and sold them to new generations of fans.

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For PlayStation themselves to buy Bluepoint, not use them for the one thing they would have bought them for and now close them down is just the most colossal waste. It's industry vandalism, at scale. Former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who had live-service game brainworms (see below), deserves some of the scorn here, but the current regime--who have made the decision to close Bluepoint instead of finding something, anything from PlayStation's vast back catalogue for them to work on instead--are equally to blame.

If you were wondering how the rest of PlayStation’s recent purchases were going, the answer is: they’re not doing great either.

Like so many other consumer electronics companies out there at the moment, Sony is about to be in a lot of trouble thanks to the AI-fuelled rush on computer components like storage and memory. The company's solution, at this stage at least, seems to have come from an evening spent looking at the trolley problem.

As Inside report (via GameSpot), Sony CFO Lin Tao spoke about the company's mitigation plans during their latest financial results presentation, saying that while Sony are "[negotiating] with various suppliers to secure enough supply to meet the demand of our customers" when it comes to being able to manufacture more PS5 hardware (there's enough to get them through the 2026 holiday season, apparently), they've decided that in order to "minimize the impact" of further console price increases, they're going to really start "monetizing the installed base" across both games and "network services".

That's all she said, but it doesn't take a crystal ball to see what she means: most likely it'll result in stuff like PlayStation Plus price increases and more expensive games (or more games launching at the most expensive price point). I get the impulse; it's probably easier to squeeze each existing customer a little than try to sell a new one a console that, if costs were passed directly onto them, could be $600-700 by Christmas. And I sympathise to some extent with individuals at Sony who are just trying to sell PlayStations and cameras in a world where the deluded impulses of 13 trillionaires are going to drive us all mad.

But also, as a company, Sony can't "we're all trying to find the guy who did this" their way out of this either.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is in line to potentially earn $35 billion in stock options, so long as the company hits a $100 billion market cap. One way to hit that target is by cutting costs, and one way of cutting costs is to close down a bunch of stores. The company closed 590 stores in fiscal year 2024, and said in a recent SEC filing that it anticipates "closing a significant number of additional stores in fiscal 2025." With the fiscal year set to end on January 31st, it appears the race is on, and according to a blog tracking closures, GameStop is planning on shuttering (or already has) over 430 stores this month.

As of Sunday, January 11t …

Read the full story at The Verge.