Things aren’t great over at Xbox right now. Microsoft‘s games wing is undergoing substantial re-structuring right now, with ongoing layoffs planned to the tune of 3,200 jobs. As a result, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s recent trip to Japan has drawn some ire from the former boss of a studio within the corporation.

Sharma visited Kojima Productions in Tokyo, both to check out the company and spend some time with Hideo Kojima himself. Photos of her time there were posted on the back of the announcement that one of the team’s games, Physint, is now being published by Microsoft after it was dropped by Sony.

It’s certainly a bit eyebrow-raising given the state of the neon green system right now, and a tenured developer has taken some time to say so.

“Super funny that Asha Sharma said ‘Clarity is kindness’ to the WSJ last week then did a half layoff today,” Shannon Loftis, ex-studio head of Age of Empires developer World’s Edge, writes in a Threads post. “I guess Damocles’ Sword is a form of clarity, what do I know?”

She’s referring to this profile of Sharma from the Wall Street Journal, covering the Xbox head’s philosophy towards handling redundancies and internal turmoil. Sharma lives by “clarity is kindness,” delivering anything bad straight and to-the-point. There’s something to not beating around the bush, I suppose, though it’s probably hard to see any niceties when you’re being told your job’s at risk.

The axe of Xbox’s recalibration reportedly fell on World’s Edge this week, as details of layoffs have been dripping out through social media. Loftis, who left the outfit in 2022, also made a post on LinkedIn commiserating with her former colleagues, saying she’s “crushed” by the news. “I do not know of everyone that has been impacted by today’s news, but I can guarantee these people know how to ship games and make gamers happy,” she said.

You can feel her frustration in her Threads post. “Please, Asha, publish more ‘cool’ photos from your Japan Kojima-maxxing trip,” Loftis adds. “That’s the kind of leadership game developers need.”

Ooft. I can easily imagine the devs that have been let go or found their roles and teams significantly changed over the last few months balking at Sharma’s heavily publicized time with Kojima. Watching leadership write a check after all sorts of redundancies is serious whiplash.

But then, Sharma’s job isn’t to make friends, it’s to dig Xbox out of the hole it’s currently in. Getting a Kojima project hasn’t hurt in scoring headlines. Only time will tell whether it moves the needle for Microsoft more substantially.

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