Xbox aims to return to growth by June 2027

Sharma has been leading Xbox since February and has since made a radical change to the organization. He had already previously indicated some of the critical issues to be resolved: a responsibility structure that was too dispersed, the increase in costs of hardware components, a studio park considered oversized and a platform infrastructure not yet ready for future challenges.

In addition to the internal reorganization, the company has made Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution exclusive for Xbox consoles, a line that the company intends to continue in future titles. Sharma also set a particularly ambitious, if not unrealistic, long-term goal: to make Xbox one of the few companies in the world capable of entertaining over a billion people every day.

In Thursday’s memo, the executive outlined four priorities for the 2027 fiscal year: strengthening the platform with the console as a driving element, transforming the most successful games into global franchises, developing Minecraft as the creation platform par excellence and expanding the narrative universes most loved by fans.

The path towards these goals will be marked by three phases. The first envisages a return to growth by the end of the 2027 fiscal year. In the second, which will cover the 2028 and 2029 fiscal years, the new strategic bets must translate into real value for players and an acceleration of revenues. The third phase aims to consolidate what has worked: by fiscal year 2030 the goal is to reach half of the long-term goal on the number of daily users, with double-digit growth sustained over time and margins at the top of the sector.

Sharma also provided some data, albeit generic, on the current user base of Xbox, defining it as one of the largest stadiums in the world in terms of aggregation capacity: over 100 million people involved every day, 500 million every month and almost a billion on an annual basis. The executive reiterated that the console remains the beating heart of the brand, generating the majority of revenues and continuing to represent the flagship experience of the ecosystem, while the operating system, Game Pass, Windows and streaming become the tools to intercept new players and developers.

On the studio front, Xbox is abandoning the decentralized model in favor of a structure more concentrated on flagship franchises and the most promising ideas, a choice already visible in the large-scale relaunch style dedicated to Fallout. The company intends to build long-term plans for its core brands, extending them to cinema, television, consumer products, sponsorships, live experiences and new international partnerships, including China. According to Sharma, three Xbox franchises already generate over a billion dollars in annual revenues, without however specifying which ones.

To grow in the casual games segment, Xbox will leverage King, the Candy Crush company, and Microsoft Casual Games. Finally, Minecraft will receive more substantial investments than in the past, confirming the central role attributed to the title in the strategy of the coming years.