Xbox CEO tells staff a fifth console is coming as she says game production is changing

A fifth console confirmed

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has told staff that a fifth-generation console is coming. She made the statement in a letter to Xbox employees worldwide titled Xbox 25th Anniversary, published on Xbox Wire on 12 November 2026, Pacific time.

The letter does not give a launch date, a name or specifications for the console. It places the confirmation inside a review of Microsoft's history in games, from the 1979 text adventure Microsoft Adventure to the original Xbox in 2001.

The argument about how games get made

Sharma's central claim is about production. She wrote that through human history the scale of what people create has been set by labour, money and resources, and that this relationship is being broken.

In her description, one person will be able to command a large range of skills and abilities, a small team will be able to build worlds that today need hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars, and larger studios will be able to pursue game ideas beyond what is possible now.

The letter does not name the tools behind this shift. The report on the letter reads the passage as a judgment about the direction of game development as tools such as AI advance, and as a signal of further changes at Xbox.

What the letter looks back on

Sharma's history starts with Microsoft Adventure, a text adventure adapted by Gordon Letwin, one of Microsoft's first 13 employees, who later became an architect of OS/2. She then cites Bruce Artwick's flight simulation on the 16-bit IBM PC and a decade of releases including Minesweeper, Age of Empires and four more versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

She describes how a small team working on DirectX proposed building a console on PC architecture, leading to a secret project called Project Midway. The original Xbox arrived in 2001 with a hard drive and an Ethernet port at a time when, according to the letter, nine out of ten households still used dial-up internet.

Xbox Live followed a year later, with persistent friend lists, matchmaking and a shared service for developers. Sharma ties those features to Halo: Combat Evolved, the launch title she says defined the console.

Open questions

The letter sets out a view of production and confirms a next console without saying what either means in practice. It gives no timeline for the hardware, no detail on which studios or teams will change, and no explanation of how the shift in production it describes will be organised inside Xbox.

Xbox has not published further details beyond the letter.