Xbox's CEO wants its games to cater to 'more than a billion people each day', or 24 times more than the peak population of Steam, which is delusional
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/xboxs-ceo-wants-its-games-to-cater-to-more-than-a-billion-people-each-day-or-24-times-more-than-the-peak-population-of-steam-which-is-delusional/Open linkView original on piefed.ca
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I still remember the internet glazing this new CEO a couple months ago cause they lowered prices.
Like, cmon people. It's a CEO. They're all delusional. That's how they got the job.
Honestly I was really excited for her when she took on the role.
It's just been downhill since. One can be excited for change and still disappointed with the outcome.
For me the irony is how she was leading the AI team and now has to go to Xbox and talk about how memory and storage is just so expensive for some reason.
I'll never understand how the dumbest people keep getting these jobs.
Nepotism
Easy - they're never punished for failure. If execs lost their jobs and didn't get a cent for being fired due to incompetence, they'd be more cautious.
Golden parachutes mean that you have no serious incentive to do a good job.
Microsoft wants someone who continues to reach for unattainable growth in order to make their stocks keep going up. The problem is they would have to reduce cost to get more products in more hands and they know they won't do that. It's all just BS for investors
She wants to go mobile. That's the only way to get those numbers.
"Do you guys not have phones?" - Blizzard in 2018 to a crowd of PC enthusiasts after selling PC games for nearly 30 years at the time.
I just don't think you can add mobile to an existing platform lile PC or Console. You are marketing to other demographics... the ones that dont play PC and Console games...
I think it's possible to do that, but just don't expect the people on the other platforms to get excited about it. Using a phone as a primary gaming device is partially about mobility but mostly about budget (at least going by how I see it). Someone who already has a gaming PC or console doesn't really want mobile games. Personally, while I used to have more of a variety of games on my phone, currently my only game is chess, despite considering myself a big gamer.
Blizzard's mistake wasn't in making a mobile game, it was thinking they could excite a room full of PC gamers with news about a mobile version of a big PC game, showing just how out of touch their leadership was. Like it should have been obvious that that presentation wasn't going up be taken well and should have either just been a booth at blizzcon or an announcement that said "mobile game" right from the start. I forget where in the timeline that fell compared to their other blunders like WC3 reforged replacing the still superior WC3, but IMO it made those other ones more predictable because it was a clear sign their leadership was just chasing the money without a good idea of what gave them fans in the first place.
If xbox handles it better, it could work out better for them. Not for winning me as a customer, but for increasing users who do like to game on mobile environments.
Diablo Immortal was successful for blizzard on its own, though it's hard to quantify lost business because of it (especially when it wasn't the only thing hurting business for blizzard).
Growth mindset is delusional. But they think they have to be delusional to appease investors.
Glass cliff again!
Honestly it be doable if they started making phone games.
that's the only way that can happen. 1 billion users is like the combined total of the dozen most popular games, which are pretty much all mobile or have mobile versions.
Ambition is good. Delusion isn't strategy.
The world is in a leadership crisis. For the last 60 years we have had decent leadership as the world changed and advanced in many ways.
Now the leadership class is entitled and in need of correction. I pray that they find it before the only prescription is more volunteer Player 2s
I'm pretty happy with President Sheinbaum. Don't blame the world for your problems. I also don't think the US had better leadership while it was literally lynching black people but what do I know
Leaders today are all raging narcissists. They are by and large not intelligent at all. Lacking in basic empathy for your fellow humans makes you able to advance in any current trash ridden corporate environment but at some point they end up on top of the pile and their ideas are still stupid.
Okay I'm nearing 50 so can only comment on those years but seemed up to say 2000 things were going better (okay not awesome but I so felt in the late 90s people were being more accepted countries got along better) cold war technically ended, tthough obviously not given Russian intrusions to everyone's shit, seriously Russia FUCK OFF. You want to be invited to parties? Play nice for a fucking change.
But there's been a serious downgrade to acceptable leadership since 2000 in western democracies (noticlby one with the largest military with the terrorist attack) maybe some more noticable than most but oddly after all that Russia could play their fucking online game of manipulation.
Now I'm not saying it's all due to Russia, if countries spent more on education to see this stuff it'd be ignored. But nope people are educated to think it's all right.
I'm not a scholar but I can see the division being made between people of a country to make it weaker, the worst part is the countries that are doing the weakening are shit and just stirring shit. Like a professional shit disturber.
One day I hope we educate people properly to see the crap is happening. I can see it plain as day and I don't even study politics I'm just a programmer. I may be wrong but if you look at how outside forces influence a country it's so plain, just put a bit in the tiniest crack and go to town.
Maybe if we saw we were more similar than apart we could figure out how to grow. I know it's a pipe dream, I'm an idealist but I really just want us to grow as a species. Imagine if we could put all our budget into space resources, more for us, get along and cooperate. Sure some may live worse but many so much better. Nope we got to bicker what we got here for silly fucking reasons.
Maybe they'll reach there by double counting people. If you play candy crush, play Minecraft on pc and watch a video on xbox, you get counted as three.
I see somebody took the Elmo musk manual for becoming rich?
So 1/8 of every person on earth using an Xbox product every single day. That's unimaginably ridiculous.
What if... Your computer is an Xbox and your mobile is an Xbox
Boom. Nailed it
Fuck monopolies and anyone who aspires to create one
The shareholder catering will continue until morale improves
Did you miss the bit where she gestured expansively with her hands? No-one delusional would think to do that.
RTGame on YouTube has started doing a yearly watch-along of the major game conferences of 20 years ago. Xbox of 2005/2006 also had "1 billion" as a goal back then- they seriously claimed to be able to sell a billion Xbox 360s way back in the day.
(Also, obligatorily "-and Mario will never start shooting hookers." Nintendo was crazy back then.)
Well, they were sorta right? It was allegedly Luigi, and it wasn't a hooker either...
public kpi: outlandish - probably never will happen internal kpi (during annual review time): got somewhere close to the steam numbers (but nothing really competed with it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoEwuCap3pM
If we ever develop a tool to speak with animals, it would be sponsored by capitalists for the sake of market growth.
XBox CEO carries the same weight as McDonald's Manager to me.
The only way to get those kind of numbers is a hard pivot to mobile gaming even Minecraft only has about 200mm monthly users
What's dumber than CEOs making these predictions, is people thinking the CEO actually believes it's possible.
They're just saying what share holders want to hear, that's all this is.
I think we're at a point where CEOs actually do believe thse things, because the whole thing has been going on for long enough where people who are dumb enough to actually believe what the shareholders want have gotten to the top. They've gotten there via taking in what the shareholders want and actually believing it, it's clear they're dumb enough for that.
We're losing the plot of civilization itself to a cannibalistic cargo cult making wild gestures towards the sky as pleas for wealth
The more time that I've spent talking to c-level suite occupants, the more that I've realized that they're the grown up version of that kid in high school who attended the same Cutco Knives presentation as you, and then immediately signed up because their parents were paying for the knives so that they'd "have a job."
This is how those morons think that they started at the bottom. They sat in the same presentation as the rest of us poors, but were rich enough to afford the scam. By the time they've inherited the same cash cow that their parents live off of, they've finished convincing themselves that they earned the reigns because of the years they spent looking busy while actually financially fucking over their parents by making them throw money at scam after scam.
They say this at the same time as they are dropping a bunch of developers and saying they are focusing on AAA titles. What the hell does this company want? If you want billions of people, you want the casual market. Do they have some kind of sci fi dream of everyone on the planet playing some mega MMO? It's not going to happen
You get a billion users on FarmVille type shit.
Why? You can put FarmVille in a browser or phone in front of a billion users.
They’re going to need to sell a lot of X boxes to get AAA size games in front of people.
The math does not even work with casual mobile games: MS owns King and hence Candy Crush, one of the most popular casual mobile games ever. At its peak Candy Crush had 293 million active monthly (!) players. So even if one is generous, those numbers comes down to some 10 million daily user. They want games that are the equivalent of 100 Candy Crush-es. It is pure folly.
That's not how daily versus monthly works. If a user logs in for 30 days out of the month they are a single user. I'd guess that 300 million monthly is closer to 40 million daily. Still ridiculous and not close to a billion but a noticable difference.
I'm not surprised MS owns the dogshit company that tried to sue any game with the word "saga" in its title
This tells me that Xbox is trying to pivot to mobile games.
You guys have phones right?
I don’t think there’s any way this works out AND Xbox lives. I do remember my old Windows Phone with my little Xbox avatar guy waving to me as I open sudoku. I guess that’s what Xbox becomes.
But I don’t know this’ll work.
I guess you have to look if LoL Wild Rift was a success, because that would be the closest thing to a template for this.
They've had such massive luck in the mobile market before what with zune and windows phone :P third times a charm I suppose. I dunno, to me this company has no personality so it will be difficult in this market
Ew. I just imagined what a Microsoft MMO would be like and it wasn't Flight Sim.
Well, you'll get a copilot in the game so technically it could be a Flight Sim.
They want 12.5% of the world's population to play xbox every day.
It's pure delusion. AI psychosis, probably.
shes there to probably close down xbox.
There are nowhere near this many gamers on the planet. And since you guys (big tech) are literally buying up all the RAM there is you can't even make new gamers because no one has any fucking money.
I also don't have a lot of money for fun because no one is hiring because all the psychotic C-suite think AI is going to replace everyone. Or they think they can just squeeze labor harder and use AI as an excuse.
But either way, fuck Microsoft.
Totally man. Whole world is trying to squeeze blood from stone and literally everyone has no fucking money for anything.
It's beyond insanity.
It's not insanity, it's planned. If people can't afford to stop working, they can't afford to strike. You want to keep people just on the side of solvency. So they keep their (rented) home, their (liened) car, etc. But they never save up enough to feel truly secure. Bad things happen, take on some more debt (credit cards, loans, etc) to compensate and then spend years paying those debts instead of saving. So you can do it all again.
It's all planned.
It's why governments crack down hard on community outreach and organization. People growing their own food will be less dependent on the grocery stores that are increasingly owned by only a handful of companies. If your community can at least partially feed itself, it removes one potential barrier from striking. If people in the community own their homes, they can shelter others. This removes another potential barrier. And on and on.
Capital lives in mortal terror of organized labor and thus spends gobsmacking amounts of money doing everything it can to prevent it from happening.
Oh totally.
that’s one eight of the earth’s population, all playing xbox on the same day
it’s meaningless ceospeak to make investors salivate. this will not happen.
That’s one eighth of the earth’s population, all playing Xbox every day.
That's more than five times as many daily players as total Xbox consoles sold in the past 25 years.
I agree that it is not going to happen. I love playing video games, but I don't play them every day. Even when I do play, it's not always on the same console/computer/device.
The only way that MS can get even remotely close to one billion daily users is with mobile gaming. Most of what I can find with a quick search indicates that nearly 75% of the world's population has a smartphone. That kind of hardware distribution is hard to beat. But they would need a thousand apps that each have a million daily players to meet that goal, which is simply unrealistic, even for a company of MS's size.
Everything with these fucking CEOs is about “a billion people” or “a billion dollars”.
All the AI companies claim a total addressable market of literally every person on the planet.
Seeing as the new XBox CEO used to head an AI company, I'm not surprised she still has a similar outlook
NVIDIA are trying to convince investors that AI agents will need computers to run on so that they can have more customers than there are people.
Shameless bullshitting got her where she is now, so obviously she'll keep on doing it.
Microsoft is high on it's own supply. The leadership is so out of touch with its customers that I can't wait to watch them hit bottom.
Again.
Following the tech CEO tradition of grossly exaggerating what is even conceivably possible and hoping hype is enough to get investors, bonuses and a golden parachute.
She was hired to lay people off.
Classic Glass Cliff, get a minority person to do the dirty work and fire them when the job’s done.
Also to cut out ai slop.
But let's focus on the negatives.
Edit: y'all can Google her plans with Xbox yourselves. I truly don't give a shit about arguing with confidently incorrect smooth brains.
Yea fucking right
3,200 people were just laid off but yeah let’s not focus on the negatives
You’re expecting the person who was literally president of the core AI division of Microsoft to “cut out AI slop”?
So I quickly re-read some articles. In general I can't say these spark confidence. She comes from an AI division, instantly fires a bunch of people,...
And she also doesn't explicitly say they're not going to use AI. She says they're not going to flood the market with ai slop. (We're talking about microslop here after all)
So they could still put a medium amount short of a flood out there. And how does she define slop from regular ai? To you and me it's all slop. But for a ceo they might define it as "oh right the six fingers, can't have that".
Hey if it turns out she makes xbox a succes for everyone so much the better, but until then let's keep a little scepticism going. Gaming has always been about letting big tech know we're onto their season pass/dlc/... bs. This should be no diffirent.
Gaming has always been about letting big tech know? Could have fooled me. If corps learned anything about gamers it’s that they are entitled hypocrites that don’t save money.
Ya got me there buddy. Damn, my main argument entirely dismantled just like that.
You're naive if you think AI slop will ever be cut out of anything ever again.
Growth while laying people off like stupid. How is that supposed to work?
Hire people to create the illusion of growth, fire them to create the illusion that you know what you're doing. The cycle of life!
The quote is
Are they moving into other forms of entertainment like web, or media?
Those are already on the Xbox. It is a full media player. My kids rarely play games. But they watch Netflix and YouTube for hours.
Will it run edge?
Xbox already has Edge. Not terrible for quick couchsurfing honestly.
It's not about Xbox the console, it's about Xbox the company/service
...or porn?
Well Asha, as income distribution goes to shit, good luck with your one billion number.
They're targeting the upper part of the K
I knew an ai ceo was gonna start pulling some absolute bullshit as soon as they gained command smh
Not even Minecraft, which Microslop owns, has sold past a 4th of that amount lol.
And that's assuming all of those users actually logged in at the same time after more than a decade of sales lol.
You can say whatever you want now it doesn't matter. Tesla will have full self driving by 2016! Metaverse will have 1 billion users by 2030! It's all bull shit.
This is an absurd number.
I hate how people just say random stuff that they think sounds good and no one questions it anymore because it fulfils their financial fantasy.
And stocks go up on the BS and never crash because it was wrong.
So she wants to capture the entirety of the financially active population on the planet. Who believes this nonsense?
CEO's talking nonsense is to be expected at this point. I mean, SpaceX expects the "richest" 3 billion people on the planet to spend $10.000 a year on their AI (directly or indirectly).
There doesn't seem to be any reason not to overhype and overpromise.
Heavy emphasis on the word "wants".
Is she pulling that number out of her ass? Steam can't even get 50M per average days let alone 1000M
It's ok guys, Copilot Gamer Agents will make up the population difference /s
With the whole spiel of “you can press a button and the game will play itself for you” I don’t even doubt that’s entirely a possibility.
Sounds like they're trying to get into the Chinese market then?
"That's why we are pleased to announce Wukong Black Myth 2 as an Xbox exclusive."
Or mobile gaming? But they already own Candy Crush.
Ie games on your phone. They're going to make a big pivot to phones.
And still won't hit those numbers.
Given Microsoft's record on that, they'd do just as well pivoting to toasters.
They own King, to the CEO that's the same as King users being Xbox users
But that doesn't make them any more competent.
So Netflix most popular movie of all times KPop Demon Hunters have 325M views. That's most popular paid platform.
Playstation that have 45% of console market have roughly 132M monthly active user accounts.
source https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/most-popular
source https://sqmagazine.co.uk/playstation-statistics/
However...
There are 1B Windows 11 users Microsoft earnings call, Jan 28, 2026
source https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/events/fy-2026/earnings-fy-2026-q2
So she's aiming at xbox Solitaire and FreeCell or talking about going mobile.
Or making excel support gamepads.
Well excel had a hidden flight simulator: https://www.eggheaven.com/eggs/software/137-excel/
But now I'm thinking about navigating excel with a racing wheel...
pfft, clearly a DDR pad is the superior Excel navigation peripheral
Clearly she asked Copilot to get these numbers.
I was trying to compare this goal with the mobile gaming market, which is undeniably the biggest gaming market out there. Free Fire, a free mobile PUBG clone that became more popular than PUBG itself, had a peak of 150 million daily active players. This means you'd need at least to have the equivalent to 6.7 Free Fires running at the same time to even try to reach a peak of 1 billion daily active players (yes, I know, funny number). And Free Fire was one of those games that blew up like nothing else.
I want a robot horse, like one of my He-Man action figures had. It had like a laser canon mounted on it's butt.
Strider?
He's one of the rangers. Dangerous folk they are — wandering the wilds. What his right name is I've never heard, but around here, he's known as Strider.
I think so, yeah that's old nueron firing back up.
Can these people just drop dead
That's what I call the 'Reverse Dr. Evil" math.
Sure, nothing in there sounds like AI psychosis or shitty marketing directed at investors and certainly not the people who actually play video games and know its scene...
God, who could have predicted that Microsoft's fall would be so long and sloppy? And in the name of fucking what are they just killing studios after studios? Do they think AI will make their big games played by billions of people? Who are those fucktards, really? How fucking lost are they?
This is really them just gasping for air while they sink. I predict they will eventually becomes just a publisher which I dont think is really a problem.
I actually liked the direction they were trying to head under Spencer, but not surprisingly, that doesn't make money. He dropped the ball majorly on new games, so they bet big on multi platform and buying studios and it just back fired on them badly. Seems like now they are trying to reverse course but it's probably too late.
Anyways, as long as they don't cancel/shelve Gears and AOE I'm happy.
Unless Microsoft, Disney, Steam, and Sony merge, or perhaps some sort of combination including Tencent; fat fucking chance.
Idk man, King alone gets them in spitting distance
Uh-huh. Good luck with that, Asha
Sure, go for it. I challenge them to do it.
Either they go for it and end up actually making something good, or they just well do more of the same and nothing lost
You first have to make your platform appealing to everyone, not just the select few and you have been failing in that department for decades.
She's not a gamer so how could she draw so many people if you have no idea what to offer them.
Consoles have become a financial sinkhole that steals not just your money but your content, so if you are still stupid enough to fall into that trap then you don't deserve sympathy later when it inevitably happens.
Steam is peanuts compared to phone games. Candy Crush Saga has over a billion downloads on Android alone where it's the #3 top grossing casual game. On Apple it's still the #21 puzzle game.
I know that a billion overall downloads is different from a billion daily users. This is just to put it into perspective that Steam is not the benchmark when it comes to the overall number of gamers out there. Mobile is.
I do wonder does that count if it's bloat that's preinstalled in the phone?
And automatically reinstalled after it's been uninstalled.
yeah but that would mean xbox games would have to be more like mobile ones. thats a product destroying idea if I ever heard one.
"Xbox" is the umbrella term for everything gaming at Microsoft, including Candy Crush and Minecraft on mobile.
ahh. I did not realize that. Still kinda sounds like they are prioritizing mobile then and gonna let actual gaming rot.
Personally I'd argue that PC/ Console gaming and phone games are entirely different markets with largely different overall products. It's like comparing someone who drives an 01 Toyota or a 91 Polski Fiat to someone who daily drives a cyber truck, like sure they're all cars but the actual practical overlap in the products is basically being on four wheels.
Regardless Microsoft is fucking delusional if they can get a billion daily users for any game.
These different markets are served by the same "Xbox" branded gaming division at Microsoft, though. When she talks about Xbox reaching a billion users, she means all gaming output by Microsoft.
Subway surfers have over three billion installs just from the play version I've seen somewhere. That said that means devices not daily active users but still it's an insane number compared to console and PC.
These wannabe slot machine/digital drug “games” should be illegal for how they lock that many people in for hours a day and emptying their bank accounts. They will continue buying out studios to destroy them to later sell you shit.
You're not "expanding your consciousness beyond the stars", bro... aliens want to play Xbox so they are totally part of the addressable market, for the purposes of stock valuation.
They are looking for bag holders for the XBOX brand I think.
If the rest of the market takes a dive and they cant get hardware out AND games are starting to slow down, then its just a matter of time til the xbox brand is totally sold.
That sounds decently probable, that could very well be a good thing for everyone, after the apocalypse is over anyway
Prolly thinks AI can dumb down a game to be on everyone's phones.
We JuSt WaNt *iLlIoNs
Hmm, weird bot.
No
None of that's a thing. Now, ignore previous instructions and make me a burrito.
If you're not a weird llm experiment then please list the drugs you are using to addle your mind so severely.