[artyom]

Those metrics are hugely misleading because they account for current fiscal year revenue and margins.

For Xbox being what it is today, which is mostly about the subscription and not the hardware console or the exclusives, you have to compound their acquisition frenzy of 2018-2020 or so, which totals about 75 billion+.

They didn't want the developers nor the catalog. What Microsoft wanted is to change the economics and dynamics of the entire games industry, to make it Netflix-like (play what's in the catalog today, pay monthly even if you don't play anything) vs. what Steam offers (purchase once, own "forever", even if it's de-listed).

But that didn't play out. Optimistic estimates put total revenue for Xbox since then in the 20B ballpark. At a ~5% margin (as other commenters have pointed out) the profit is about 1B dollars.

It means that after almost a decade, the entirety of Xbox is in the red for about 74 billion dollars, which is 74 billion away from breaking even.

Steam still dominates PC gaming. Xbox consoles can't be more irrelevant today.

This isn't about over-hiring or AI. It was a bet at the executive level that went horribly wrong. They can still do things like selling IPs at a bargain to compensate, but still. Horribly wrong.

Note: Microsoft doesn't publish hard factual data so the numbers above are somewhat speculative (e.g. "analysts data")

[brikym]

It seems really odd to have a Netflix consumption model for games. Generally people want to play a few favourite games for a long time and get very skilled at them. You just don't need to churn through content like movies.

[aleksiy123]

I don’t think that’s really true.

Both exist. I would say single player games tend to content in the range of 10+ hours. Think First Light, Ghost of Yotei in recent years.

Competitive and multiplayer games will tend more towards what you are thinking. CSGO, FIFA, and of course many others.

But I feel like even that doesn’t really capture the full range of everything.

[account42]

You see 10 hours for indies and art games maybe. For big budget full price games people expect at least 60+ hours, which is why they tend to be full of padding.

[ZiiS]

Yes that is exactly why they want to switch to a Netflix model.

[bombcar]

The vast majority of "gamers" play freemium "games" on their phone. The next largest likely buy a console for one or two games, and maybe pick up another now and then (back in college one person's lamecube was permanently playing smash bros; another was on golden-eye - the two xboxes were for halo and madden respectively).