// KOTAKU — GAMING
Xbox Can’t Meet Ridiculous New Goal Of ‘Entertaining’ 1 Billion A Day Even If We All Boot Up A Call Of Duty Right Now
Today, Xbox announced it would be laying off approximately 3,200 individuals—roughly half of them today, the rest throughout the year—as the company undergoes “the most significant restructure in Xbox history.”
This devastating move is seeing multiple studios cut loose, teams reorganized, and livelihoods lost, all because, according to Xbox, the business is “operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses.” The many, many studios Xbox rushed to acquire in recent years have not been profitable enough to warrant Xbox’s continued investment, so it’s shedding as much as possible while seemingly preparing to pour the saved money into what remains: whatever games that Xbox thinks will turn big profits.
CEO Asha Sharma is calling this a “reset” for Xbox. And she shared a very specific, quantifiable goal for this move:
“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.”
One billion per day! That seems like a big number! One billion of anything is nigh unfathomable to most people. A lot of people are pointing out the absurdity of this number, but it got me curious: Xbox is now going to be operating with fewer games, and far fewer people. What would it actually mean for Xbox to achieve one billion daily active users? Can it?
Well, for starters, there are approximately 8.3 billion people on planet Earth, a number that includes newborn babies, the very old, and loads of people who live in places where it is impractical or too expensive to own an Xbox, or where Xbox doesn’t even operate. So Sharma wants a little less than one-eighth of the entire world’s population to be a part of the Xbox ecosystem, daily.
It is absolutely believable that a billion people would use a piece of technology every day. Google, for instance, doesn’t publish its DAUs, but almost certainly pulls in a DAU count in the multi-billions. WeChat is also estimated to be up over a billion per day. Meta, as of its last earnings call, boasts 3.5 billion daily active users across all its major services: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, and so forth. That’s split across several services, sure, but Xbox’s goal would similarly be split across multiple games and games as a service.
Admittedly, though, Meta is an outlier. No other tech company comes close to its DAU count. A bit more realistically, as of 2023, there are 3.2 billion gamers in the entire world. So Xbox is aiming to have a little less than one-third of all gamers using something Xbox-related every single day. When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound totally implausible, I guess. Xbox is a part of Microsoft, which makes Windows PCs, so it’s really capturing two audiences. Three, add in mobile gaming, because Xbox also owns King, which makes Candy Crush, while Minecraft and Call of Duty and a few of the company’s other games are also on mobile, plus cloud gaming. Oh, and there are some Xbox games on both PlayStation and Nintendo, too! So okay maybe, across all of these platforms, Xbox could get up to a billion folks per day.
Let’s think about Call of Duty, which is Xbox’s most popular gaming property by far. As I write this, Warzone has about 38,000 people playing it on Steam, with an all-time peak of 491k. That’s just on one platform: it doesn’t count Xbox or PlayStation players, so the actual active number is probably much higher. But these are rookie numbers; even the most generous estimates don’t get the Call of Duty playerbase anywhere close to one billion. It might, maybe, on a good day, brush one million, of which there are 1,000 in a billion. Heck, as of last year, the entire Call of Duty franchise, from its very inception, had sold 500 million copies. So if every single person who