Asha Sharma has laid out how she intends to drag Xbox back to growth, and the ambition is enormous. In an internal memo obtained by The Verge, the Xbox CEO set a first goal of returning the division to "player and revenue growth" by the end of fiscal 2027 while lifting profits "back in line with industry averages," building toward a long-term aim of entertaining a billion people daily and achieving "industry-leading margins" by FY30. It's a genuinely bold vision. It also arrives days after Xbox confirmed 3,200 job losses, with 1,600 already gone and another 1,600 expected before FY27 is out, which is the tension sitting underneath every line of the plan. Sharma is asking a workforce she's actively shrinking to deliver some of the most aggressive growth targets the division has ever set.
The strategy itself is organised around what Sharma calls the "Four C's," a framing that tells you something about how the memo was assembled but does at least make the priorities easy to follow. Core means strengthening the Xbox platform, "led by console." Content means growing great games into global franchises. Creation means making Minecraft the world's leading creator platform. Connection means extending the worlds fans love into more entertainment and experiences. Progress is meant to unfold in three stages: return to growth in FY27, turn those investments into "meaningful player value and revenue acceleration" across FY28 and FY29, and then "scale what works" toward the 2030 goal of being halfway to a billion daily players with "sustained double-digit growth."
The Gap the Plan Is Trying to Close
To understand why the memo reads the way it does, you need the numbers Sharma is staring at. Xbox currently reaches roughly 100 million people daily. The ambition is to be among the handful of companies entertaining more than a billion. That's a tenfold gap, and it explains the urgency. But the more revealing figure is one Sharma posted publicly on X, admitting that "in FY26, over 200 million new players came to Xbox and our games, but our business did not grow with our audience." That single sentence is the entire problem in miniature. Xbox is attracting enormous numbers of players and failing to convert them into revenue, and the Four C's are essentially an attempt to close that specific gap, to make the money grow at the same rate as the audience. It's a real and honest diagnosis. Whether four alliterative priorities are the cure is another question entirely.
The backdrop makes the challenge starker. FY26 closed with Xbox revenue down $1.7 billion, its first annual decline since Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, alongside the worst annual console earnings in over a decade, content and services down 10%, and hardware down 13%. So the plan to "return to growth" is starting from a hole, and the honesty of Sharma's framing, that the business is unhealthy and the audience-to-revenue conversion is broken, is refreshing but also a reminder of how much ground there is to make up.
"Led by Console" Is the Word Worth Watching
The first C carries a genuinely notable phrase. "Core: strengthen our platform, led by console" reasserts hardware primacy at a company that has spent years insisting its games belong on every device. That's not just rhetoric either, since Xbox has recently made Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution console exclusives, with more reportedly planned, a striking reversal from the everywhere-Xbox philosophy of the Game Pass era. Sitting that console-first framing next to hardware revenue falling 13% and the ongoing port of Xbox's back catalogue to PC and handhelds produces an obvious tension. Xbox is simultaneously telling players it's platform-agnostic and telling employees the platform is led by console. Both can be partly true, but the memo's emphasis suggests leadership has concluded that giving people a concrete reason to buy the box, chiefly exclusives, is central to fixing the revenue problem.
Minecraft getting its own dedicated C confirms what the earnings and reporting already implied, that it's the load-bearing pillar of Xbox's future. Sharma pledged to "invest in Minecraft more than ever before," aiming to turn it into the world's leading creator platform with better tools for players to build, share, and earn, essentially positioning it as a Roblox-style ecosystem. This is the game that reportedly funded the rest of Xbox's failing portfolio, now formally elevated as a cornerstone of the recovery, which makes complete sense but also underlines how much rides on a single 2011 title.
The Number Sharma Wouldn't Name
One omission speaks loudly. Sharma wrote that three Xbox franchises "already generate more than $1 billion annually" but pointedly declined to name them. In a memo otherwise packed with targets and metrics, refusing to identify the division's three biggest earners is a conspicuous gap, and it's arguably the single most useful piece of information the company could have shared. The likely trio, Minecraft, Call of Duty, and Candy Crush maker King, tells its own story about where Xbox's money actually comes from, and it isn't the prestige studios the reset just divested. The memo also flagged plans to expand franchises like Minecraft, Fallout, and Candy Crush through media adaptations, consumer products, and international expansion including China, which is the "Content" and "Connection" strategy in practice.
More:Xbox's Grim Quarter Puts Hard Numbers to Sharma's Diagnosis
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