Nilay Patel

We'll see you next time.

Hello and welcome to Decoder.

I'm Neil I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

Today, let's talk about the future of Xbox.

Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming and a two-time Decoder guest who's led Xbox for more than a decade, just resigned.

But in a shocking twist, his deputy and long-assumed successor, Sarah Bond, is also out too.

And Microsoft Gaming is now in the hands of Asha Sharma, one of Microsoft's AI executives with no prior game industry experience.

It's a major leadership transition that suggests Microsoft wants to make serious changes to its gaming division, which owns franchises like Halo, Call of Duty, and Minecraft.

There's literally no better person to talk about all this with than Tom Warren, a senior editor here at The Verge and author of the excellent newsletter Notepad.

Tom just had a new baby.

He's actually out on parental leave right now.

But Microsoft has a long habit of disrupting his time off with major news.

So Tom was gracious enough to come back on the show after he published a major scoop about what exactly went down at Xbox this past week.

There's a lot to say about Xbox.

The story of the console and Microsoft gaming is a complicated one, with a lot of twists and turns since that first Xbox console made its big splash in the industry 25 years ago.

But for a majority of the time since, it's been stuck in third place, behind Nintendo and PlayStation.

That's a surprising thing to say for a division of a company worth trillions of dollars

and also owns some of the most celebrated gaming properties in all of entertainment.

And so Phil Spencer, who started at Microsoft in the late 80s and took charge of Xbox in 2014, was given the job of trying to turn things around.

Since then, he has tried many things.