With due fairness, these are two different sets of leaders and two different strategies.

A lot of the strategy you outlined -- buying all these studios, replicating netflix, giving away day one games, raising game pass -- was a strategy put in place by Phil Spencer. Phil pushed for this investment with the promise it would pay off later for MS. He's talked publicly about having to convince Nadella to put up ungodly amounts of cash for these investments and about how the bar for expected return was very very high. It seems like it clearly hasn't worked out to Microsoft's expectations or they've lost patience for waiting, and Phil has now "retired to spend more time with his family" (i.e. been fired).

Now Asha is here and presumably has a mandate to fix this and get back the profit margins that were expected from xbox. Sarah Bond, the xbox president, has resigned, and with this letter it seems the previous Xbox COO is out too. There is clearly a huge shift in Xbox leadership happening and it shouldn't be surprising that Asha -- who is known as a business-driven executive and not a 'gamer' -- is going to be reverting a lot of previous strategy decisions.

My 2c is that Phil's strategy made sense on paper, but I don't think they were able to manage this many studios in practice: nearly all the studios they bought have failed to produce the number of games expected on time or on budget. It also turned out that overly cheap gamepass would cannibalize their business and overly expensive gamepass turned away subscribers. I think the netflix model isn't something you can speedrun and execution of it turned out to be very hard and expensive. Maybe it would've worked out with more time but it seems Nadella didn't think so anymore.

Xbox around 2021 had around a 12% profit margin and the gaming industry as a whole was around 17-22% . In 2023 the target for the division was put to 30% . We see this new restructuring because the target was put this high. Microsoft really wanted Game Pass to be a steam competitor which is pretty much what everyone in the industry tries to do and fails. The push for Game Pass prices to be higher was to get the 30% margin and that didn't work out. They aren't operating at a loss they are operating at a goal and they failed the goal. From other child comments many studios they bought probably were below average. We can see this restructuring basically is that they failed the target, the old guard went out as the new guard came in.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-23/microsoft...

> - The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million

> So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous).

How is that profit margin distributed though? King (Candy Crush etc) and Mojang (Minecraft) are specifically called out as money-makers, it's possible that they're carrying the majority of profits while everything else is a dud:

> We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested.

As an example, Double Fine (one of the studios being chopped) has released 2 games since 2021, Keeper (191 peak player count on steam) and Kiln (163 peak players); these would be flops even for a normal indie game, for a studio getting Microsoft salaries those are enormous flops.

Game Pass was never a sustainable business model. People liked it because when a new game came out, they could buy a month of game pass for like $15, play through the game in a couple weeks, and cancel. It was a really good deal because Microsoft has spent the past decade+ trying to recover from their terrible fumble of the Xbox One launch, so they were subsidizing gamers to come back to their platform.

With the money being spent on AAA titles these days, they are not going to make any money without increasing the price of Game Pass majorly. The big price bump they quickly backtracked on was an attempt to make Game Pass somewhere closer to being profitable.

It comes across to me as a really honest letter. At least they are talking about spinning out studios instead of shutting them down, I think that plays better than previous announcements. (e.g. make a hit game like Hi-Fi Rush and get shut down!)

Completely agree. Their problem is that corporate wants more money to funnel back into AI and it is really inconvenient that Xbox provides only a couple billion dollars per month whereas Office and Cloud provide many more billions. What a complete joke.

> Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass

A company that sells consoles complaining about not having enough games after 25 years in business and acquiring most popular game studios is hilarious.

They keep cutting game studios, killing games and then set ambitious profit margins. At some point you have to question, do the people in charge understand their own business at all?

They just gutted bungee and basically killed Destiny 2, not because the game won’t sell, but because it won’t generate the profits they unrealistically set.

Compulsively chasing only the highest margins has been toxic for the country as a whole.

Different eras of Xbox, and tech as a whole.

Spencer's strategy for Xbox was very 2010 coded: rely on the billion/trillion dollar company to undercut the competition and gather market share and leverage. Classic embrace, extend, extinguish. That's why they bought a bunch of arthouse studios who don't immediately make money, invested hard in a subscription service that was wildly unprofitable (a strategy that even TV services couldn't make profitable, mind you), and focus on moving software more than hardware.

That strategy shifted dramatically between rising interest rates, a cooling consumer market, business uncertainties, and companies simply wanted to throw any excess fat into the AI rat race. So those art house studios were removed, Gamepass needs to enshittify pre-maturely,production needs to slow from a variety of offerings to the usual safe and sure releases. And of course, the biggest expense needs to be trimmed down on: because no one is stopping them from doing it in the US.

The number will still go up, but in different ways. They aren't doing this because they are in the red, they are doing it because they want all the money instead of a lot of it.

Well this is the new Xbox boss, Aska Sharma trying to course correct her own actions after pushing out Phil Spencer (and team). Phil had a deep understanding of the game world about profit margins and how the Xbox is essentially a stake in keeping Microsoft in the minds of consumers, a place in the home. Aska has a shallow understanding and sees only the financials and wanted to increase profits. Now she is burning it all down to try and “reset” and replace people with LLMs to increase profit margins. I imagine she will be pushed out herself end of year or next Spring (2027) once her naïve plan back fires.