Former Age of Empires boss Shannon Loftis has backed ousted COO Helen Chiang, slammed the "leak" about her exit, and says she feels terrible for anyone still working under Xbox leadership.
Former Xbox Game Studios VP Shannon Loftis replied to Helen Chiang's exit post on LinkedIn: "Team Helen all the way."
She called the leak claiming Chiang was fired for policy violations false, and said it shows a loss of "clarity" in Xbox leadership.
"It's a clownshow up in there and I feel terrible for anyone that still has to deal with it," she wrote.
"Clarity is kindness" is CEO Asha Sharma's mantra, and also the title of Chiang's exit post. Loftis has mocked the line before.
Microsoft still won't explain Chiang's exit and hasn't named a new COO.
The Helen Chiang saga at Xbox just picked up a heavyweight in her corner. Shannon Loftis, who spent nearly three decades at Microsoft and used to run the Age of Empires studio, has publicly backed the ousted COO and called the current Xbox leadership “a clownshow”.
“I feel terrible for anyone that still has to deal with it,” she added. Not exactly a polite LinkedIn “congrats on the new role”, is it.
We covered this earlier in the week, but here’s the short version. Chiang, a 21-year Microsoft veteran and former Minecraft boss, was made Xbox’s first ever COO in July as part of CEO Asha Sharma’s “Xbox Reset”. About three months later she was gone, announced in a very short internal memo with no reason given.
Eurogamer then reported, citing a single source, that she’d been “terminated for policy violations”. Chiang hit back on LinkedIn, denying she broke any policy, leaked anything, left for a competitor or quit over missing out on the top job. Game Developer’s rundown of her post says she also specifically ruled out things like discrimination, bullying, harassment and fraud. She said she has “serious concerns” about how Microsoft’s standards were applied in her case, though, as GamesRadar+ pointed out, she didn’t directly deny being pushed out.
Replying to Chiang’s post on LinkedIn, in a comment first shared on X by user Knoebel and verified by GamesRadar+, Loftis didn’t hold back.
“Team Helen all the way,” she wrote. She said the “leak” itself, which she called false information, “shows the loss of moral character and ‘clarity’ in leadership at Xbox”, and invited everyone to speculate on who made “THAT decision”. A real leadership team, she said, would have “relentlessly pursued the ‘leaker’ and taken appropriate action”, because confidential personnel matters can be grounds for defamation lawsuits.
Then the closer: “It’s a clownshow up in there and I feel terrible for anyone that still has to deal with it.”
Notice the word Loftis put in quote marks. “Clarity is kindness” is Asha Sharma’s management mantra. She used it in a Wall Street Journal profile in September to explain her blunt approach to running Xbox through layoffs and cuts.
So when Chiang titled her exit post “Clarity is Kindness”, it read like a pointed jab at her old boss. Nobody involved has said that’s what it was. But it’s a hell of a coincidence, and Loftis’s comment about “clarity” in leadership leans right into it.
It’s also not the first time Loftis has used Sharma’s own line against her. Back in late September, Insider Gaming reported that she mocked the “clarity is kindness” quote in a since-deleted Threads post after a fresh round of Xbox layoffs landed the same week. In a LinkedIn post she said she was “crushed” by the cuts and told affected staff, including people at her old studio World’s Edge, “you are SO much more than this.”
She isn’t some random ex-employee with a grudge. Loftis joined Microsoft in 1993 as an IT project manager, moved to the games side in 1995, and stayed for 29 years. She was the head of World’s Edge, the studio overseeing the Age of Empires series, and was a vice president at Xbox Game Studios before retiring in early 2022. These days her LinkedIn lists her as a self-employed “video game maker”, and she’s chaired the board of the IGDA Foundation.
In other words, she knows how Xbox works from the inside, she still has a lot of friends there, and she clearly doesn’t care who reads what she thinks of the people running it now.
Microsoft hasn’t responded to any of this publicly. Its only line so far is the one from Xbox comms boss Kari Perez: the company “does not discuss individual personnel matters”. There’s still no replacement COO, no explanation for the exit, and no comment on the leak.
Meanwhile the wider Xbox picture keeps getting messier. This year it’s lost Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, made big layoffs in July and again in September, and the latest reports have Ubisoft among the studios interested in buying Arkane from Microsoft. Sharma has had to tell people “Xbox is not for sale”.
We still don’t know why Chiang left, and Loftis doesn’t either, or at least she hasn’t said. Her suggestion that leadership itself leaked the “policy violation” line is just that: a suggestion, from someone openly on Team Helen. Keep that in mind.
But she’s right about one thing. A company that refuses to say anything about why an exec left, while an anonymous source smears that exec in the press, doesn’t get to hide behind “we don’t discuss personnel matters”. If the leak is wrong, Microsoft should say so. If it’s right, it should back it up. Saying nothing just lets it stick.
And when your boss’s whole brand is “clarity is kindness”, and your exit is the least clear thing in gaming this year, people are going to notice. When a 29-year veteran who helped build the place calls it a clownshow, that’s not just one bitter ex-employee. That’s a loud warning about how the people still working at Xbox might be feeling.
Is Loftis saying what Xbox staff can’t, or is this just sour grapes? Come have your say in the GetRekt Discord.
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