Xbox's Turnaround Moves Aren't Moving the Numbers, Analyst Says
Circana's Mat Piscatella says Asha Sharma's fixes, from disc-to-digital trade-ins to Gears of War exclusivity, show no measurable payoff in US sales data.
Asha Sharma has run Xbox for eight months, and the analyst who tracks American game sales says the ledger has not noticed.
Mat Piscatella of Circana told The Game Business he is watching the same US sales and engagement numbers everyone else is, and he cannot find the turnaround in them. The disc-to-digital trade-in program, he said, "hasn't changed their sales of new physical software trend at all." Making Gears of War: E-Day a console exclusive to Xbox, meant to give hardware sales a reason to move, "hasn't made any difference" either, according to GameSpot. He called it, approvingly, "a Gears-ass Gears of War game," which makes the result worse, not better: a good game shipped onto one platform instead of two, and the platform still did not move. "You chop the legs out" from under it, he said, and Sharma's stated supply constraints do not explain a console that, by his account, is easy enough to buy in the US right now.
The Call of Duty decision reads the same way in his numbers. Pulling Modern Warfare 4 out of Game Pass, he said, cost the franchise "a ton of engagement," with no offsetting gain anywhere he can find it. "You got no benefit," he said. "It's really hard to find any signs of positivity or hope on that platform right now." His read on the whole stretch of moves is blunter still: efforts aimed at "Twitter likes" from the loudest fans, with nothing showing up in the results that actually fund the business. Other industry observers have pointed to evidence that E-Day was built for PS5 before Microsoft chose never to release it there, a decision some read as designed to cost Sony goodwill rather than win Xbox any.
None of this makes Sharma's memo to staff, seen by CNBC, any less fluent in the vocabulary companies reach for in this spot: a "long-term" view, every studio pushed back to growth by the fiscal year ending June 2027, a new unit called XP stretching Xbox into film, television, consumer products, sponsorships, live events, and a fresh push into China. The math underneath the language is the actual target: Xbox's internal margin sits near 3 percent, against roughly 9.9 percent for PlayStation and 16 percent for Nintendo, and Sharma wants parity by 2027 and the lead by 2030. Translated, that memo is not a promise to players. It is a schedule for the investors who will be asking, every quarter between now and then, whether the number moved, while the people building the games wait to find out what "focus" costs them this time.