Xbox’s bold plan for the future seems almost impossible

It’s another bad week for the video game industry. Microsoft scheduled a series of layoffs on Monday, which Xbox CEO Asha Sharma described as “The most important restructuring in Xbox historyBut buried in Sharma’s note was a strangely optimistic statement: “I want Xbox to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people every day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect.”

Xbox has been a mess After spending billions of dollars to deliver little, Microsoft is now aiming to reach a much larger audience with a much smaller team, amid one of the most challenging times in the industry’s history. Sharma’s goal of one billion people may seem strange at the best of times. Now it seems almost impossible.

The job cuts will see Xbox lay off 1,600 employees this summer, with another 1,600 expected to be laid off over the next year. This is all part of Wider restructuring at Microsoftalthough the gaming section has been particularly hard hit. Four internal Xbox studios – Double Fine, Compulsion Games, Undead Labs, and Ninja Theory – are also setting up as independent developers. Which might be the good news. These studios have been acquired over the years primarily to bolster the offerings on Game Pass, Microsoft’s subscription gaming service, but now it appears the company is moving in a different direction.

What is this trend? Well, it’s not entirely clear. (Confusing strategies have become pretty standard for Xbox lately.) Xbox has lost a lot of money — Sharma claims that “in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested” — and now the goal seems to be to focus entirely on the bigger properties that have a better chance of being big hits. The teams that stay at Microsoft will “focus on higher-priority projects,” says Sharma. This does not just mean those closely associated with the brand, e.g aura and Gears of warbut also the hugely popular franchises under the Xbox umbrella, in particular Minecraft and Candy Crush.

In fact, as part of the recent restructuring, Helen Chiang – who previously oversaw… Minecraft Franchise – Promoted to a new role as COO of Xbox, reporting directly to Sharma. “She will bring our businesses together under one operating model, ensuring that we make clear investment decisions, learn from our successes and failures, and hold ourselves accountable for results,” Sharma said of Chiang’s promoted role.

With this focus on larger projects, some of the changes at Xbox make sense. If your goal is to reach a billion people a day, this is a game from a weird studio like Double Fine A conscious beacon It probably won’t move the needle compared to expansion Minecraft or Candy Crush.

But the reasons behind other cuts are more ambiguous. If your goal is to get into the big games, why also “make the cut?” In places like bethesda (He falls, Elder Scrolls), identification card (death), and perhaps the most prolific studio on Xbox, Obsidian (I confess, Outer worlds)? It seems like these teams will need more investment — and, at the very least, so they don’t have to spend the next year wondering if they’ll be affected by the next wave of layoffs — to make a big movie at a time when the industry is as volatile and unpredictable as ever.

You just have to look The deplorable state of the live service space Let’s see how bad things can get when companies simply chase big numbers. The entire industry opinion fortnite Printing money has become a cultural phenomenon They hoped to recreate it for themselves, spending billions of dollars collectively in the process. The result was a cemetery Canceled games and Close the studio. In 2026, until fortnite Himself is struggling.

All of this makes Sharma’s goal of eventually reaching “a billion people every day” seem even more absurd and ridiculous. It’s not clear what metric you use to measure this number. Xbox is unlikely to reach that in terms of daily player counts even if you take into account mobile gaming and expansion into China and emerging markets like India. Which is what Sharma plans to do. king He says Its game lineup attracts more than 200 million monthly players, so you will need quite a few Candy Crush Applications even come close. This is assuming that follow-ups will be as successful as the original, which rarely happens (Just ask Niantic). Sharma really wants to keep it going Pushing the Xbox brand into Hollywoodmaybe He falls Viewers — Amazon says 100 million people watched the first season — will count toward that goal. But even if you add games, TV shows, and Game Pass subscribers, a billion people a day is a very large number.

So instead of a clear path forward at a time of increasing uncertainty, Xbox has a vague and seemingly unattainable goal in front of it. We will do this with a smaller team and it will continue to shrink. “These changes are about a bigger future for Xbox, not a smaller one,” says Sharma. But it is difficult to see how this happens. Xbox was already suffering from an identity crisis We’re headed toward these layoffs, and this lack of vision doesn’t make things any clearer.