Xbox laid off around 1,600 people earlier this week, revealing plans to part ways with five studios at once. Naturally, boss Asha Sharma has been tasked with justifying all of this, and she’s now as close as possible to pointing the finger directly at Phil Spencer’s regime, while also claiming that if Xbox was doing well, the RAM crisis would have been something the company could have just pushed through.
“To grow, we made a lot of bets…and in doing so, we didn’t focus on our core business,” the CEO said in an interview with Fortune (a house with a rather ironic name for a conversation where an executive talks about firing other people). “The number one measure of your strategy is what you spend your resources on, and we’re just spreading ourselves too thin.”
This is not the first time Sharma has pointed out the strategy employed by his predecessors Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, as well as his current chief content officer, Matt Booty. However, it’s arguably the most candid picture of the game of executives being behind Xbox’s current problems that she’s painted.
Then she said that if Xbox wasn’t in total shit, they could have solved the current RAM crisis. “A healthy Xbox could withstand the shock of the hardware crisis,” Sharma said. “With Xbox in poor health, it becomes really difficult and it accelerates a lot of changes we need to make.” This seems ridiculous, given that the same hardware crisis is affecting companies like Valve, Sony and others that aren’t bad enough in Xbox’s specific situation.
Of course, in theory, being in better shape could allow Xbox to consume a bit more of those rising component costs without raising prices for the consumer, but with no end currently in sight for the upward arc of those costs, it seems at best a temporary bandage on a gunshot wound. There’s also the question of whether Xbox would actually absorb the costs before raising prices if it was better positioned to do so, given that doing so would likely further reduce the still-large profit margin.
“I think our core needs to be healthy, and that will be necessary but not sufficient,” Sharma said in conclusion. This last part is both very telling for Emperor Palpatine and feels like it could be an ominous hint of much more pain to come.
