Celebrating the passing of the first 100 days under the new XBOX leadership, CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty have published a blog post discussing what the next 100 days for the company will look like. All in all, the duo has written about five major “realities” that XBOX will have to navigate – both positive and negative – as it looks to the future.
While XBOX proudly touts the over 1 billion players that experience games through the platform, including consoles, PC, mobile, and streaming, the company is now fighting for attention. The company notes that, even with the biggest franchises being developed under its banner, XBOX still has to fight for player attention against other games, TV shows, franchises, creators, content formats, and apps, among other things.
The second reality is the fact that XBOX is ending its fiscal year in June with its accountability margin being down by around 3 percent year-on-year. This has largely been due to the investments that the company has made in its content, platform, and hardware subsidy, which led to annual revenue going down by almost half a billion. These losses don’t even include the gigantic investment the company made in its acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. “Going forward, this cannot continue,” reads the post.
Another major issue plaguing XBOX is the rise of component prices, namely storage and memory. Sharma mentioned that the company was already paying double the price for console storage components when compared to Fall 2025. She expects this trend to continue, believing that prices leading up to the 2027 holiday season will have gone up by more than 5 times the price that XBOX was paying two years ago. While the path forward in this regard remains unclear, Sharma mentioned that, “we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix.”
On the subject of games made under the XBOX Game Studios banner, the post notes that, despite the investments made in acquiring studios to build up a strong, steady pipeline of game releases, not enough investment has been made to fund studios due to over-extension of the company’s budget. With XBOX now having taken the first steps towards first-party and third-party exclusive releases, Sharma and Booty believe that “We need to reassess the balance between these and our investment priorities for the next 5 years.”
And finally, Sharma and Booty have acknowledged that the platform infrastructure at XBOX “is not built for the battle ahead” due to systems being “overly complex, spanning hundreds of dependencies”, preventing the company from moving as fast as it would like. To deal with this, they have committed to changing things up. “Going forward, we’ll evolve and rebuild our stack and look at capabilities across all of XBOX and potential [mergers and acquisitions] to help us win in hardware, PC, mobile, and streaming.”
“For some of you, these realities will be surprising and even frustrating to discover,” wrote Booty and Sharma at the end of the post. “We won’t succeed by hiding hard truths, nor will we succeed by doing the same thing and expecting different results. Like the ‘everyday wins’ mentality from the first 100 days, we will sprint to make progress against hardware, content, experience, and services together.”
“XBOX is one of the few places where people come not just to play, but to connect with others to create memories. With console at the center of how our showcase experiences are defined, Windows as one of the largest gaming platforms in the world, and incredible games under our roof as one of the largest publishers in the world, we have the foundation in place.”
