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The story
A U.S. gaming site reported that Circana analyst Mat Piscatella said none of the measures Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has taken to turn the business around have had any effect. On 5ch’s console-wars (geha) board, posters compared this to the era of former chief Phil Spencer, speculated that Xbox itself could be restructured or sold off as Microsoft pours its capital into AI investment, and split over how to read the numbers behind the scale of the business’s value.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has taken various steps
to get the Xbox business back on track, but none of them
has had any effect — according to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella
Source: gamespot.com / Original article here
What people said
they held the decline to 20%.
Doing alright, honestly.
Microsoft proper doesn't care about anything but AI anyway.
Re: #15
Just a little while ago everyone was gushing that Phil was a genius and everything he did was right.
The second he gets fired, suddenly it's "he was always incompetent, nothing but failures the whole time" — rewriting history like that is rough.
It's still a net loss though lol
Cutting Gears off PS is literally what's accelerating the losses, I'm telling you
Lol this guy still thinks he's fighting the good fight
Embarrassing — just come home already lol
At this size it's probably too huge for anyone to even raise the money to buy it.
Looking at how the reorg is shaping up, it feels like Microsoft is keeping only the hardware division directly under itself and folding game development into Activision and ZeniMax.
So it sort of feels like they're planning to split off hardware and games and sell them separately.
And reading today's move as also cleaning up the Gears division still sitting directly under MS… eh, that might be reading too much into it.
Then let me ask — if they have no intention of selling and plan to fight it out, why did they just start offering buyouts to the entire workforce?
Once the talented people decide to walk, there's no stopping them.
I think the urgent priority right now is building a solid distribution network and actually keeping it on retail shelves.
Anyway, next month Skyrim's 15th anniversary overlaps with the Xbox 25th anniversary event, so I'm curious what gets announced.
They should also reveal details on Helix, which they teased would get "more info before year's end."
so it looks like the bad news for Xbox isn't done yet.
Lol, the reverse pattern
No — given they need investment capital more than ever, if they cashed out by selling off the entire game business, that'd be a meaningful sum even for the AI business.
If there were nowhere else to invest, they might just leave the game business alone even running at a loss or breakeven.
But in the current "pour everything into AI, slash headcount and every other cost just to fund AI, invest or die" mode,
a low-margin business just sitting idle gives them a real motive to sell it and cash out.
Even liquidating the whole game business only gets you into the tens or hundreds of billions range, right?
AI is a fight measured in the tens of trillions, even hundreds of trillions.
What good does a few percent in cash do?
Can't tell if you're talking yen or dollars, but —
in dollars, MS's AI investment runs around $200 billion a year.
As for game company valuations: Activision is worth about $70 billion, EA about $50 billion.
Microsoft's whole gaming business is estimated around $150 billion.
At minimum the numbers you quoted are off by an order of magnitude — looks like you're mixing up yen and dollars in your head.
Wouldn't that still amount to a few percent in cash though?
And conversely, what's the point of tying up money in a business with negative returns?
Games used to be the cutting edge of hardware performance, after all.
Yeah, pretty much.
MS originally got into this back when people were saying TVs hooked up to set-top boxes would conquer the living room — it's a product of that era.
In reality that turned out to be smartphones, and MS whiffed badly there.
Now it's clear the games industry is ultimately just one genre of entertainment, nothing more.
So a company like MS treating it as a serious strategic investment has become a shaky proposition.
That game will definitely end up on the next-gen console.
They've already been hinting at it, so I'd call it basically confirmed.
Microsoft: "How would you feel if Xbox titles and Minecraft pulled out of Switch and PS5?"
https://krsw.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/ghard/1792024590/
Asha's probably going to scrap Game Pass Day One before too long,
and the only thing that could offset that is Xbox exclusivity.
TES3 Morrowind was console-exclusive to the original Xbox, and TES4 Oblivion didn't hit PS3 until a year after the PC/Xbox release.
So it wouldn't be weird at all if TES6 "Sentinel" ends up PC/Xbox only 🙄
The pricing alone is going to be brutal.
Even with Switch, the original is still selling right alongside Switch 2 —
so a PS6 or new Xbox would be even less viable.
They'll just have to keep selling PS5 and Xbox Series side by side, and I think the old generation stays the mainstay regardless.
Current-gen consoles are already stupidly expensive, so I'm fine with it getting shelved another 5 years.
Though I don't know if my XSX will even last that long.
What do you mean by "extra mess"?
Slashing staff and cutting services to prep a business for sale is a totally normal step every company goes through.
Is it really plausible to gut the headcount of a "consumer hardware business" — where manpower matters more than almost anything — and then sell it off?
It's not like a buyer would just be after Xbox's IP, right?
So a platform holder shrinks itself down and then says "please buy us"? This isn't some ordinary business — it's a platform.
Background and key points of this topic
Circana is a market research firm that tracks sales trends in the games industry, and analyst Mat Piscatella is known for regularly publishing North American hardware and software sales figures. Xbox’s leadership has transitioned from Phil Spencer to Asha Sharma, and the thread also buzzed about how opinions of Spencer’s tenure shifted before and after the handover. Where opinions split was over whether Microsoft, as it concentrates capital on AI investment, will end up selling off the Xbox business — with posters disagreeing on whether the proceeds of a sale would be large or small relative to the valuations of companies like Activision and EA. Note that the claim about restructuring (voluntary buyouts) being underway was only raised within the replies themselves; the source article simply reports the analysis that “existing turnaround measures haven’t had any effect,” not a confirmed decision to sell the business.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “[Good News] The Xbox Goddess Asha’s Effect Is Starting to Show!!!!!!.”
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