Another day in the video game industry, this Monday Microsoft announced layoffs at Xbox. 1,600 at once, five studios to make a living and another 1,600 layoffs over the next few months. To carry out the restructuring, what is known as “Xbox reset”Microsoft put Asha Sharma at the head of the company who came from one of the company’s AI divisions and who arrived with a clear mission: to break with the past.
After weeks of good words, drastic decisions began and, in a release gigantic, justified the decisions of layoffs and restructuring (the consequences of which we still do not fully know, since we have been learning about layoffs in different Xbox studios for two days). There are interesting data, such as extreme bureaucracy within Xbox that had complicated things in recent years, the enormous investment in Game Pass and the fact that caught my attention the most: the number of daily players that Xbox wants.
Because Sharma talks about wanting a billion people to be “entertained” with Xbox every day. And, after wondering what it means to have a billion people every day on your platform, I have only been able to come to one conclusion: I would like to see how they do it.
The Xbox of a billion players and the old woman’s account
I don’t say this in a defiant sense, but out of genuine curiosity. I would like to see how Xbox, or any company, for that matter, is able to bring together a billion people a day on its platform. Sharma comments that they see themselves capable of achieving that goalbut the point is that there are many more stimuli than ever and, furthermore, setting these goals only has one consequence: when they are not met, there will be more ‘resets’.
Let’s go in parts.
The changes they are making seek to ensure that “Xbox has a bigger future, not a smaller one.” Furthermore, he notes that “the next decade of games will be bigger, more global and more creative than anything we’ve seen before.” Said like this, you may think that they are going to invest a lot (they themselves say that they are going to invest a lot, but with a better focus and discipline), but there is a problem: are there really that many players willing to be on your platform? What is an Xbox?
Answering the first question, players… there are. We are more than 8,000 million people throughout the world and esteem what’s there around 3 billion people who play video games. This in total, not on a daily basis and, furthermore, you must keep in mind that everything is mixed here: the accounts include everything from the most ‘Eat’ of ‘Call of Duty’ to your grandfather who plays ‘Candy Crush’ or a Facebook game.
Responding to the second, Sharma says they want a billion people entertained with Xbox. And not only those who have a console count (whose sales are quite poor), but also those who play from PC and Xbox games on Steam and platforms like PS5. That is, everything that has the Xbox seal.
That said, let’s tell why one billion people seem to get it “easy” Yes, you have so many franchises and you are present everywhere, but things get complicated if we put the magnifying glass on the few games that can really help the company achieve those figures.
They are all estimates, but we would talk about 110 million monthly players in ‘Minecraft’, between 70 and 90 million (counting mobile phones) monthly in ‘Call of Duty’ and between 200 and 300 million players diaries in ‘Candy Crush’. There we see the dimension of mobile games, really, and how they crush those on more traditional platforms. ‘World of Warcraft’ too would enter there, with about 9 million monthly players.
These are figures that many companies would like, but they are far from those 1,000 million a day that Sharma points to. To further contextualize, Steam, which is another of the huge video game platforms, had its historical peak of players a few months ago, reaching more than 42 million. In the last 24 hours, almost 39 million people connected and, as we see in graphs like Steamdb, they are very stable… and in growth.
Well, Sharma wants the same as they would get 25 Steams every day.
As a player, I would love to have so many people because it would allow, perhaps, the industry to be somewhat more sustainable because there would be many more players among which smaller studios could find their place to grow, but the problem I see with these accounts is that, publishing that you want there to be 1,000 million people on your platform, the only result (the most likely, at least) is failure.
And when you fail in such a large company when you have set this as an objective, the manager is not the one who pays the bill: it is the employees. It’s something we see constantly and We come from three years of constant layoffs in the industry to be optimistic about the issue.
What we have seen these days is that they are changing the strategy in that sense. They are releasing the smaller studios that do not sell to bet on what makes money. An example is King (‘Candy Crush’) and Mojang (‘Minecraft’), which They will report directly to herwith Sharma being the one who will make the decisions to achieve the objective. Another thing is whether people who watch the ‘Fallout’ series, a game series whose license belongs to Xbox, count as “people entertained by Xbox.”
We just have to wait and see what happens, but it is evident that Xbox’s turnaround is there, releasing studios that were developing games with soul to bet on what makes money. After all, it is the objective of every company.
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