Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has expressed hopes that Xbox can be a company that “entertains more than a billion people each day” amidst drastic change at the company.
This statement comes at the tail end of a lengthy internal letter announcing that four studios are splitting off from Xbox, and roughly 3,600 staff are being laid off.
The full quote reads: “I want Xbox to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect. I know we can achieve this goal. XBOX has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history, talented studios around the world, and we will return to growth in 2027.”
To compare, Fortnite during the release of its OG map in November 2023 saw 44.7m people hop online within a single day, the highest recorded peak player count for the industry-leader. Roblox, another titan of popularity, hit its all-time-peak of 47.4m players last year. Those two games’ combined peaks, assuming there is no player crossover at all, wouldn’t meet one tenth of Sharma’s aspirational figure.
It’s not as though Xbox doesn’t have some stellar developers still under its hat. Mojang and King, who according to the letter will now be reporting directly to her, are themselves juggernauts of the industry. But even then Mojang’s crown jewel Minecraft – one of the best selling games of all time – has sold 350m – 400m copies across all platforms over 15 years.
As such this figure from Sharma may sound impossible, but King may actually offer a path for this billion daily players to be possible. King is the developer of Candy Crush, which as a free-to-play mobile game has been downloaded over 3.6bn times. We don’t know an exact peak daily player count for Candy Crush, but it comes in at over 100m daily active users. This total, added to the above, still only accounts for one fifth of Sharma’s stated goal.
So perhaps with King doing its thing and a line-up of newer games focused on key Xbox franchises, the totality of daily users could meet the one billion mark. It’s certainly a bold call, considering the rough community reception to today’s cuts and a string of prior pitfalls the company has fallen into.
