“In order to grow, we made a bunch of bets…”
Xbox laid off around 1600 people earlier this week, revealing plans to part ways with five studios at the same time. Naturally, boss Asha Sharma’s been tasked with justifying it all, and she’s now gotten as close as she likely ever will to pointing the finger directly at Phil Spencer’s regime, while claming that if Xbox were doing well, the RAM crisis would’ve been something the company could just tank their way through.
“In order to grow, we made a bunch of bets…and as we did that, we inherently didn’t focus on the core business,” the CEO said in an interview with Fortune (a rather ironically named home for a chat where an exec talks about laying other people off). “The number one measure of your strategy is what you put your resources behind, and we simply spread ourselves too thin.”
This isn’t the first time Sharma’s pointed the finger at the strategy employed by her predecessors Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, as well as her current chief content officer Matt Booty. However, it is arguably the most frank picture of executive gambling being at the root of Xbox’s current problems that she’s painted.
Then, she said that if Xbox weren’t up shit creek, they’d have been able to tank the ongoing RAM crisis. “A healthy Xbox could weather the shock of the hardware crisis,” Sharma declared. “With an unhealthy Xbox, it becomes really challenging, and it accelerates a lot of the changes we need to make.” This seems ludicrous, given that same hardware crisis is affecting companies like Valve, Sony and others who aren’t in Xbox’s specific situation pretty badly.
Sure, in theory being in better shape might allow Xbox to eat some more of those pesky rising component costs without upping prices for the consumer, but with no end currently in sight for the upward arc of those costs, that seems a temporary plaster on a bullet wound at best. There’s also the matter of whether Xbox would actually eat any costs before upping prices if they were better positioned to, given that’d still likely cut into the ever-important profit margin.
“I think our core has to be healthy, and that will be necessary but not sufficient,” Sharma said in closing. That last part is both very much Emperor Palpatine speak and feels like it could be an ominous hint at much more pain to come down the road.