The time has finally come for Xbox’s massive reset—in a statement on the official Xbox site today, recently-minted CEO Asha Sharma revealed the fate of several studios. I won’t be focusing on them in this article (although you can read the words of my fellow PCG writer Andy Chalk first, if you’d like).
Instead I want to highlight (with the deserved scrutiny of a post announcing the threatened livelihoods of thousands and people) Sharma’s closing paragraph, because it’s borderline delusional.
“I want XBOX to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect. I know we can achieve this goal. XBOX has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history, talented studios around the world, and we will return to growth in 2027.”
A billion, need I remind you, is a thousand million—to give you a sense of scale, a million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years. A grain of sand is around 0.4mm in diameter. If you made a chain of them, a million grains would get you 0.2 miles, a distance you can walk in about five minutes. A billion grains would get you 248.5 miles, which’d get me, in the UK’s south, halfway up to the top of Scotland.
Or, hell—let’s talk about videogame subscribers as a metric. World of Warcraft, a videogame Microsoft currently owns, hit a peak of 12 million subscribers during Cataclysm. 12 million players, the absolute highest point of one of the most popular MMORPGs ever created, the literal biggest fish in the genre? That is 1.2% of a billion.
And we’re just talking about subscribers, not daily players. Sharma wants a daily playerbase that is the equivalent of 83 World of Warcrafts at their highest peak, all logged in at the same time. Counter-Strike, the most popular game on Steam, had an all-time peak of 1.8 million. She wants 555 Counter-Strikes every day.
Speaking of Steam, the platform hit 41 million concurrent users last year. Sharma wants 24 Steams at their all-time record heights. 24 of them. Even if we’re a bit more charitable and assume that, say, Steam hitting a peak of 41 million means 60 million players logged into it on that day. That’s still 16 Steams.
It’s a quite frankly delusional figure that’s nonetheless a perfect encapsulation of the runaway irresponsibility of Microsoft in the past few years. Multiple promising studios shut down, huge acquisitions, rampant AI spending—all of which, you might think, would make the executive class wonder if they were maybe aiming a little too high.
But not Sharma, no no no. We must entertain a billion people each day, she bravely shouts, we must be 24 Steams, and we can be 24 Steams.
And, naturally, we must do so by demanding that fewer people do more work. Sharma says she wants all of this with the same breath in which she announces Xbox will have 3,200 fewer people working for it by 2027.
The quite frankly insulting final paragraph of Sharma’s corporate diatribe is an example of the exact plague that’s boiling the videogame industry alive. There is no room for humility or self-reflection. Sharma must promise the mathematically impossible to save face, or, I can only assume, violate some arcane dogma and burst into flames. Microsoft’s year of shame is getting a sequel.
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