Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told employees this week that the business has turned a corner after a year of deep cuts. According to a transcript of an internal town hall obtained by Windows Central, which says it verified the document with trusted sources, Sharma described Xbox as being in “free fall” before this year’s restructuring and said it is now growing again.
“We’re making the right decisions to reinvest in the business,” she reportedly said. “After an all time low, we’ve started to return to growth, more than 2 to 3 times what we were, and we expect that continue.” Windows Central later clarified that the chart Sharma was using referred specifically to first-party games, meaning the titles Xbox owns and publishes. Xbox hasn’t shared the numbers behind that claim.
Per the report, as covered by VGC, Sharma said Xbox started the year declining in hours played, players, and revenue, and that hours played have since stabilized. She named Gears of War: E-Day, Minecraft Dungeons II, and World of Warcraft Forever as strong starts and said positive sentiment toward the brand rose 30% over the past year. She also said the previous Game Pass strategy had sent Xbox into “freefall” declines and hinted that Game Pass will become more “flexible for more players,” without giving details.
On hardware, Sharma called the current Xbox Series X|S generation core to the plan, pointing to cloud gaming, the disc-to-digital program, and Play Anywhere. For the next generation, Project Helix, she repeated that Xbox is building more than a box. “We are moving to a family of devices for Gen-10. There is not one device that fits all. We will certainly have a great console first, but we also know that many players will be on the go,” she said. “There are some things that we are the best in the world to manufacture, and there are other things that we will partner on.” She added that the new operating system “is starting to look really good.”
The same meeting produced The Verge’s report about Grand Theft Auto VI streaming, which Xbox has since walked back in part.
The upbeat message comes after a painful stretch. Xbox cut about 1,600 jobs in July and another 268 in September, when it also moved Halo to Activision and proposed closing Ninja Theory. For the full picture of that second wave, read RCG’s report on Xbox’s 268 cuts and studio moves.
