Xbox’s bold plans for the future sound almost impossible

It’s another bad week for the video game industry. Microsoft announced the resignations on Monday in what Xbox CEO Asha Sharma described as “the most important redesign in Xbox history.” But buried in Sharma’s memo was something interesting: “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,” he wrote.

Xbox has been a mess After Microsoft spent billions of dollars without showing much, and now it wants to reach a large audience with a very small team, among the most difficult times in the history of the company. Sharma’s billionaire ambitions can sound strange at the best of times. Right now it sounds almost impossible.

The job cuts will see Xbox lay off 1,600 workers this summer, with another 1,600 expected next year. This is all part of a major overhaul at Microsofteven the sports sector has been affected a lot. Xbox’s four in-house studios – Double Fine, Compulsion Games, Undead Labs, and Ninja Theory – are also being developed as independent developers, which is perhaps part of the gospel. Those studios have been acquired for years to boost offerings on Game Pass, Microsoft’s subscription service, but now it seems the company is going elsewhere.

What is that way? Well, it doesn’t make sense. (Disruptive modes are very good on Xbox as of late.) Xbox has been losing a lot of money – Sharma says that “in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested in it” – and now it seems like the goal is to focus entirely on big products that have a good chance of having blockbuster hits. Sharma says the teams that remain at Microsoft will “focus on more important projects.” This does not mean only those who are closely related to the brand, such as Hello and Gears of Warand the most popular franchises under the Xbox umbrella, in particular Minecraft and Candy Crush.

In fact, as part of the recent restructuring, Helen Chiang – who was previously in charge Minecraft Franchise – has been promoted to a new role as the head of Xbox, explains Sharma directly. “He will bring our businesses together under one management system, ensure we make sound investment decisions, learn from our successes and failures, and hold ourselves accountable for results,” Sharma said of Chiang’s promotion.

While looking at larger projects, some changes to the Xbox make sense. If your goal is to reach a billion people every day, a game from an unusual studio like Double Fine about bright light house they may not move the needle compared to enlargement Minecraft or Candy Crush.

But because of some wounds it is very opaque. If your goal is to lean on the big game, why “downsize”? at such a place Bethsaida (Dana, The Elder Scrolls), ID (Destruction), and, perhaps the most famous Xbox studio, Obsidian (Avowed, Foreign Countries)? It seems like these groups may need some money – and less, so that they won’t be around next year and wonder if they will be affected by the next wave of layoffs – to make a big blockbuster at a time when the business is as volatile and unpredictable as ever.

You just have to look the sad state of the community to see how things can improve when companies are chasing big numbers. All companies he saw Fortnite being a culture of printing money and they hope to reinvent themselves, together spending billions of dollars in the process. The result was a grave forbidden games and studio closure. In 2026, though Fortnite itself is fighting.

All of this makes Sharma’s goal of eventually reaching “billion people every day” seem absurd. It is unclear what metric they are using to measure this number. It is highly unlikely that Xbox will reach this level in terms of daily gamers even if you have mobile gaming and growth in China and emerging markets like India, which Sharma plans to do. King he says that his games attract more than 200 million people per month players, so you may need a few Candy Crush software that even approaches. And I’m just assuming that the sequel will be as successful as the original, which it won’t be (just ask Niantic). Sharma really wants to continue pushing the Xbox version to Hollywoodso maybe Dana viewers — Amazon says 100 million people watched the first season — will count toward that goal. But even if you include games, TV shows, and Game Pass subscribers, 1 billion people per day is a huge number.

So instead of a clear path forward at a time of great uncertainty, Xbox has a vague and seemingly impossible goal ahead of it. And it will be doing this with a group that is small and continues to shrink. “These changes are for the big future of Xbox,” Sharma said, “not the small one.” But it is difficult to see the situation. Xbox was already experiencing a problem when it comes to this layoff, and this lack of vision doesn’t make things any clearer.