Xbox

“Sarah Bond was running it for a while. She was amazing, and she left.”

“Yep, now Asha is running it, who was doing AI, and she's, like, totally overhauled the strategy, jettisoned a lot of studios.”

“Well, and did you know, I was reading an article about video gaming and it turns out the most prolific video gamer is a 37 year old man. It used to be, like, younger, much younger, like, kids and teens, and now it's 37, insinuating that video gaming has actual…”

“I mean, I think it needs to happen.”

“The newly appointed Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, has announced this morning that Xbox will lay off 3200 staffers by the end of 2027 with 1600 layoffs taking place today.”

“Xbox is operating at margins three to 10 times lower than its competitors.”

“In the typical year, Xbox lost 64 cents for every dollar it invested.”

“In addition to the layoffs, Asha said that Xbox will spin out game studios that it acquired over the years. Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, and Arkane are all getting yeeted in one way or another.”

“Satya has been running Xbox into the ground for the love of the game.”

“Tay Kim says, this hire is a literal game changer. Matthew Ball knows gaming and what needs to be done. This news makes me the most bullish I've been on Xbox in seven years, and I completely agree.”

“Basically, like, it actually turns out there's, like, a genealogy to it, and it actually turns out, like, a lot of it is literally, literally, it's like Call of Duty lobbies for online gaming, so it's, like, literally, like, online gaming lobbies because, like…”

“Project Helix is the next generation of the Xbox console.”

“And I just thought, like, oh, I am so clearly part of the problem here. Like, something about it feels broken. And within about two weeks, I resigned and knew I had to go do something else.”

“Steam has won. There's no reason to get an Xbox. There's no reason to get an Apple VR headset. They all run on Linux. It's the ultimate computer.”

“My capital allocation is for the cloud from whether it is Xbox cloud gaming or Microsoft three, six, five, or for, Azure. It's one capital outlay. And then everything is a meter, as far as I'm concerned, from an MSFT perspective. It's a question of, hey, the b…”

“If you do those things, this is a multi-hundred billion dollar asset.”

“We spend around four billion dollars or so. This is everything from Xbox support to Azure support.”

“I was at Microsoft when we launched the first Xbox. If we didn't have Halo, it wouldn't be something we talk about anymore, right?”

“Xbox has become an important part of our world. But not an important part of Microsoft's business.”

“We're underneath all the Xbox, all the PlayStation, as well as many gaming devices that that, that you buy when you buy your add-in boards.”

“Turns out that Xbox and PlayStation combined have an install base of something like two hundred million units, and you add all the, like, the smaller ones, and that's another 50 or a hundred. I forget. How many people, and the PC, hardcore PC games as well. So…”

“So able gamers got to work in secrecy with Xbox for over three and a half years.”

“And there was a moment like five or six years ago when Satya Nadella was saying that Xbox was sort of non-core and non-strategic.”

“Five hundred million dollar a year deal for Nvidia to supply the graphics for the Xbox with a two hundred million dollar advance.”

“People are worried about with the Activision deal about whether Microsoft would make Activision's games exclusive on Xbox. I don't think they will.”

“Oculus outsold Xbox this year. So Oculus sold ten million units, which is about four billion in revenue for Facebook on just the hardware for getting the games and the app store that they have.”

“In order to do that, they couldn't just open up all the millions of games that they have on Roblox that can look like YouTube in terms of almost too much choice, and Microsoft and Xbox forced them to have a very limited small number of games that were on that …”

“It's not just the death of Windows everywhere, it's also that Satya said very clearly that the Xbox isn't core anymore.”

“So we saw a significant increase in cross-device usage, which is what you always want. We saw a much higher engagement rate, and we were able to dramatically reduce the email opt-out rates as well, because the messaging was really relevant.”