Some of the recent comments from MS leadership (Asha and Matthew Ball) may suggest they are considering nerfing the Xbox Helix. I hope it does not come to that.
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[Xbox] Next 100 Days: XBOX Reset
- Thread starter Topher
- Start date
Stafford
Gold Member
Where though?
Because yesterday we had her saying Helix is happening, is leading end performance wise. But isn't the only thing they are looking at, so cheaper options as well.
Negotiator101
Member
What a woman.Team,
Over the first 100 days together, we have started to revive XBOX.
Our platform teams have already shipped more updates in the last 100 days than during the prior year combined. We now have more active partners on XBOX than ever before. Our Game Pass team set to work fixing our offering and after 8+ months of decline, our service has started to grow again. And through Player Voice, we have a 24/7 channel to hear directly from players, creators, and developers.
With the XBOX Games Showcase and the return of FanFest, we brought together hundreds of millions of fans globally. We reintroduced exclusives with Gears of War: E-Day in 2026 and Clockwork Revolution in 2027. Players can continue to expect signature exclusives from us every year. In parallel, Playground Games reminded us that established franchises can achieve incredible new highs.
These results are early, but they demonstrate what is possible when we move faster, stay close to our community, and align behind a shared vision. We have made mistakes, and will continue to make them, but what matters is that we listen, learn, and adjust the course where needed. Remember, our fans are rooting for us.
Now we start the next 100 days. It is important to have both optimism and realism as we work to reset the business.
Here are the realities that we need to navigate:
#1: Over 1 billion players choose to play XBOX and our games each year, for a total of 72 billion hours across Console, PC, Mobile, and Streaming (excluding much of China and a few other properties). Our franchises are also among the largest and most beloved globally and are now breaking records in TV and film. Going forward, our competition is attention. There are more great games, TV series, franchises, creators, content formats, apps, etc., than ever before.
#2: We will end this fiscal year at about a 3% accountability margin, down year-over-year. Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue.
#3: We are in a hardware component crisis. When I joined as CEO in February, the price we paid for console storage components was over 2x as high as we paid last fall. These costs have since doubled again. And as we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase, taking us over 5x the prices we paid only two years earlier. Memory costs have followed a broadly similar trajectory. While the entire industry is facing a components crisis, we believe we have been impacted more greatly than many of our peers due to the choices we made over the last half decade. We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy, and we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix.
#4: We expanded our studio system when we needed a pipeline of content to meet multiple strategies across subscription, streaming, and devices. In the process, we have found ourselves over extended as we executed on changing strategies in a landscape of more readily available content. We are the fortunate stewards of industry-defining franchises that have enormous potential and player demand, but we have not adequately funded them to compete and win. At the same time, as we saw this past weekend at Showcase, a reliable pipeline of first- and third-party exclusives and new IP are critical to our success. We need to reassess the balance between these and our investment priorities for the next 5 years.
#5: Our current platform infrastructure is not built for the battle ahead. Our systems are overly complex, spanning hundreds of dependencies, which hinders our ability to move fast. We've become too reliant on vendors to operate our systems and must become more self-reliant as an engineering culture to build for the future. We must increase the value we ship to players while decreasing the time it takes to do so. Going forward, we'll evolve and rebuild our stack and look at capabilities across all of XBOX and potential M&A to help us win in hardware, PC, mobile, and streaming.
For some of you, these realities will be surprising and even frustrating to discover. We won't succeed by hiding hard truths, nor will we succeed by doing the same thing and expecting different results. Like the 'everyday wins' mentality from the first 100 days, we will sprint to make progress against hardware, content, experience, and services together.
XBOX is one of the few places where people come not just to play, but to connect with others to create memories. With console at the center of how our showcase experiences are defined, Windows as one of the largest gaming platforms in the world, and incredible games under our roof as one of the largest publishers in the world, we have the foundation in place.
Let's reset for a stronger XBOX and build the #1 gaming and entertainment company.
Asha and Matt
Next 100 Days: XBOX Reset - XBOX Wire
news.xbox.com
"We are working very hard to rethink everything that we can about Helix, which is a console we are committed to shipping. We are very cognizant of the ways in which we need to change as a company to make sure it is affordable, to make sure that it's flexible."
https://wccftech.com/xbox-project-helix-console-rethink/
"We must think about other ways to think about the cost construction of the console," Sharma said
https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-b...so-microsoft-must-look-at-new-business-models
I am not saying any of this confirms Helix's nerf but it does suggest a risk of that happening.
Keep in mind that Helix could be nerfed in stuff like RAM and still be "leading (over PS6) performance wise"
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Stafford
Gold Member
Personally I'm fine if it's simply on par with PS6. Because in the scenario it's inferior I'm going to think real hard on what to buy.
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Sohurmk833
Member
Lol. They either get that thing down to mass market compatible prices or it´s dead on arrival.
MrAlwaysRight
Member
it was always dead
deriks
4-Time GIF/Meme God
If I get a manager job, for sure I would do that. Not to reserve money, but to exclude stale employees and change for fresh heads
And since it's very much normal having a studio with a 100 guys, and this studio sucks, well, bye bye
@thread
Already has been 100 days with Asha?! Holy shit, time is running way faster than I thought
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HeisenbergFX4
Gold Member
I am in the Sony camp since '98, basically only due to Gran Turismo, but I want all consoles do to well because that benefits gamers and the overal industry. I hate to see any console nerfed, especially Xbox, a console that always packed a punch (except for the Xbone).
However, since Kepler expained how things go with console hardware development (and how things are pretty much fixed) the risk of any substantial nerfing is pretty low.
However, since Kepler expained how things go with console hardware development (and how things are pretty much fixed) the risk of any substantial nerfing is pretty low.
excuse me. pretty sure in the past you were very confident with Helix. Now not so anymore?
Topher
Identifies as young
HeisenbergFX4
Gold Member
Its still coming but with Xbox being Xbox I also wouldn't be shocked if they announced today they were done making hardware
ValiantInstance
Member
Tech companies went on a massive recruitment boom during the pandemic, naively thinking that the new levels of revenue they were making were sustainable. The last couple of years have been a painful and ongoing walk back from this.
That day in the life video of that girl who worked at Twitter is what got the ball rolling on all this. Much like construction, there is a perception by the layman that programming is magic and takes much longer than it actually does. I find this myself working in data. You can get away with murder at times.
Long story short, there is still plenty of fat to cut and board members are being ruthless about it. That's without actually evaluating which studios are profitable and which aren't.
That day in the life video of that girl who worked at Twitter is what got the ball rolling on all this. Much like construction, there is a perception by the layman that programming is magic and takes much longer than it actually does. I find this myself working in data. You can get away with murder at times.
Long story short, there is still plenty of fat to cut and board members are being ruthless about it. That's without actually evaluating which studios are profitable and which aren't.
Orbital2060
Member
Launching holiday 2027 means they will have a headstart on the PS6. Maybe a year or more where they can launch next gen titles on Helix and last gen versions on PS5.
Fx Call of Duty 2027 will be a launch title for Helix, with a last gen version for the PS5.
Depending on when Sony decides to launch the PS6.
Fx Call of Duty 2027 will be a launch title for Helix, with a last gen version for the PS5.
Depending on when Sony decides to launch the PS6.
Topher
Identifies as young
Asha said Xbox would be a "reference experience" signaling OEMs would be taking over the hardware side. To me,this confirms Helix is a transition move out of hardware that we have talked about for some time.
wha a weird take. what makes you think PS6 wont launch the same year. you wrote everything with the assumption PS6 will launch a year or more. odd.
In the mind of a "non-gamer" (Xbox CEO), the question doesn't even occur to them: why don't people just stream CoD via the cloud instead of buying expensive hardware?
You just have to be a gamer to understand why people invest in ownership, the ecosystem, and low latency with maximum image quality and gaming experience instead of taking one headshot after another with a 50ms ping and a blurry streaming image.
Given Asha's background, her statements, and her lack of (gaming) experience, I see a good chance here that she'll drive the brand even deeper into the shit during realignment. All under the wonderful pretext of "we've reinvented ourselves and changed everything, but didn't work out
... Or maybe she heard of the flops Stadia and Luna, who knows.
People want security, reliability, and stability. I wonder how many more top managers the company needs before it gets the message.
Apparently, they don't want to be a brand people can trust.
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well they better not reduce RAM. I understand, from reading up on those who seem to know more about the matter, because Helix running on Windows, requires "virtualization" to play the Xbox backcompat library, just running on Windows, and the virtualization requires it to need far more RAM than the PS6.
DenchDeckard
Moderated wildly
35 million console sales isnt dead bro. Lets calm down a little.
MisterXDTV
Member
They are collapsing, no way around it
It's so poetic for a company that tried to "spend Sony out of business"
It's so poetic for a company that tried to "spend Sony out of business"
squallbr
Member
remember when PHILnĂłchio was a savior for Xbox what they did wrong?They are collapsing, no way around it
It's so poetic for a company that tried to "spend Sony out of business"
MisterXDTV
Member
Xbox shills already threw him under the bus for a girl that 3 months ago was basically unknown on this planet
LOL
panda-zebra
Member
Holiday 2027 is still the plan, at least
Until there is a new plan
What the main console version was intended to be and how much grunt it had seem completely unrealistic in the current financial and component climates for the numbers it'd do.
Problem is their build-once-deploy-everywhere mantra; the whole approach, API, OEM versions etc. A PC outperforms to-the-metal consoles by brute forcing. A less specific, more generalised hybrid device would need significant more grunt than a dedicated box just to attain parity, so already on the back foot.
Haven't read the whole thread but alot of people assuming layoffs aren't necessary is Xbox wants to be a legit player again.
Layoffs suck for those impacted, but sometimes companies get so bloated and filled with waste that they are, unfortunately, necessary. Salaries and compensation are often the biggest expenses companies have. If you have a lot of departments producing shit that drives profitability then it wouldn't shock me at all if MS sees a smaller workforce as part of the plan to revive Xbox.
And with the way Xbox has been ran the last decade I'm sure there are a lot if useless departments doing things that just aren't necessary by highly paid people.
Layoffs suck, but it isn't crazy to think MS can improve by cutting some of the bloated salaries of useless people they employ.
Layoffs suck for those impacted, but sometimes companies get so bloated and filled with waste that they are, unfortunately, necessary. Salaries and compensation are often the biggest expenses companies have. If you have a lot of departments producing shit that drives profitability then it wouldn't shock me at all if MS sees a smaller workforce as part of the plan to revive Xbox.
And with the way Xbox has been ran the last decade I'm sure there are a lot if useless departments doing things that just aren't necessary by highly paid people.
Layoffs suck, but it isn't crazy to think MS can improve by cutting some of the bloated salaries of useless people they employ.
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DeltaPolarBear
Member
MisterXDTV
Member
Studios? They were buying entire PUBLISHERS
Sethbacca
Member
Is she just counting everyone who owns a pc and touches Solitaire or something here ?
DeltaPolarBear
Member
We know Helix was a thing. It's just that the most recent update has Xbox declaring they know it is doomed as designed. And we don't know if there is any room to make changes so late in production. As some are suspecting, it might cost more to cancel than to release it.
We know this is a pivot and not us being wrong all along. That is why they call it a "reset".
ElFenomeno
Gold Member
Why are we getting XBOX internal emails, them being chatty on X, retweeting stuff from Xbots and just so much constant word vomit while from Sony is crickets?
I'm just tired. Before Asha, Phil was also blabbing all the time, with this defeatist attitude.
Please just shut up for a while.
I'm just tired. Before Asha, Phil was also blabbing all the time, with this defeatist attitude.
Please just shut up for a while.
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PauloRoberto
Member
They need to shut up and need to CUT every zealot, period.
Polygonal_Sprite
Member
I'm guessing every single Windows 10/11 PC, Xbox 360 / Xbox One / Xbox Series log in.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
I didn't know the Xbox CEO was named "Asha and Matt"
Fuck dat bitch ass mofo Matt Booty!!!
First he fucks Xbox in the ass and now he's going after my waifu, Asha.
DeltaPolarBear
Member
Asha is basically shouting "don't blame me! it was a mess before I got here!"
Because until now Xbox was living on plausible deniability. If Asha kept her mouth shut, people are going to claim SHE screwed up when it blows up. So in an unusual case of honesty Asha told everyone how much of a mess Xbox is currently in. A mess that we have always suspected but could not prove.
MisterXDTV
Member
We could prove it just by simply looking at their decisions
Steam Day 1 and Playstation 5 ports
Only idiots would fall for their bullshit
Too bad the world is full of idiots
Superposition
Member
That to me sounds like shes worried about costs to produce series s/x in 2027.If that isn't a straight up confirmation of Helix release window, I don't know what is
HeisenbergFX4
What does confuse me is she really seems convinced that series sales are production limited and not on the demand side, whole bunch of people want to buy but MS can't produce....I thought that was just Jez fantasy talk.
Masha.
what do you mean series s/x in 2027? she needs to produce Helix by then.
