Xbox Cannot Entertain 1 Billion People Daily

[00:02] world's population. That's how many people Xbox is aiming to quote unquote people Xbox is aiming to quote unquote entertain every day under CEO Asha Sharma's reset. Yes, that number probably sounds preposterous to you. It

[00:15] certainly did for me when I first heard it, but instead of rolling my eyes at it, I wanted to at least try and contextualize it. I've crunched the numbers as best I can. And 1 billion doesn't just sound preposterous. It's

[00:29] nigh impossible. Let's break it all down. dropped, much was made of that 1 billion number. Many were quick to interpret it

[00:44] to mean 1 billion daily players, which isn't what Sharma said. The exact penultimate paragraph reads as follows. Quote, "I want Xbox to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day." End quote. In

[01:00] order to reach a billion people daily, we're going to need to apply a generous definition to what entertaining someone means. I think the most liberal reading of the sentence that you could apply that allows it to become some form of

[01:14] trackable metric is to categorize entertainment as engagement. One billion people that in some form or another actively engage with some part of the Xbox brand on a daily basis. that can include everything from someone playing

[01:29] a first-party Xbox game or playing a third-party game on an Xbox console to watching a TV show based on the brand's IP or simply watching an ad on its social media channels. Are there even any brands that already achieve this?

[01:43] The two sectors where this is seemingly being accomplished are in food and tech. In the former, you have brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestle that sell their myriad products to over a billion people every single day. Conglomerate

[01:56] Unilever, which owns food brands like Helman's mayonnaise and Ben & Jerry's ice cream, as well as wellness products such as Dove Soap and Vaseline, claims that 3.7 billion people use its products every day. In the latter category, where

[02:11] Xbox resides, you have Meta, which across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp drives the most daily engagement with more than 2 billion people per day with Google with search, its suite of productivity tools, and YouTube is

[02:27] looking at a similar amount of daily users. Apple and Samsung, thanks to their large stakes in the smartphone market, both cross the billion a day mark. And then, ironically, Xbox's own parent company Microsoft does the same

[02:40] due to the proliferation of Windows. Aside from the Meta Suite, there are two other social media platforms that have a billion daily users. The first is Bite Danc's Tik Tok and the second is WeChat, an incredibly popular messaging app in

[02:54] China with small pockets of users in other parts of the world. WeChat is a product of 10 cent, a company that is also the biggest video game vendor on numerous game studios and publishers such as Riot and Epic, as well as

[03:08] internal teams that make popular mobile titles like Call of Duty Mobile and Honor of Kings. It's important to note that the amount of daily active users Tencent gets from its games pales in comparison to the amount of people using

[03:21] WeChat every day. These companies give you an idea of the kind of scale we're talking about when we say a billion people daily. They're either online platforms that people can access for free or products so pervasive in daily

[03:35] life that a large swath of the world's population can't really escape them. I brand that's primary focus is entertainment, such as Disney or Nintendo, is in this small group. So, how does Xbox get into the club? Let's

[03:50] start with the games themselves. In Microsoft's 2025 annual report, which was published around a year prior to the time of recording, the company claimed to have quote unquote 500 million monthly active users across platforms

[04:03] and devices when it came to gaming. Presumably, this ranges from everyone that is booting up an Xbox to playing a game via the cloud on their phone to someone jumping into Call of Duty on their PlayStation. Considering that this

[04:15] is also talking about Microsoft as a whole, there's a chance that some of the people being counted aren't being entertained by Xbox. Is this including people that open up Mind Sweeper? Perhaps. But, as I said at the top,

[04:29] we're going to need to be generous. So, let's assume that all 500 million players can be considered Xbox players. Calculating daily active users based on monthly active users is actually quite tricky as someone that boots up the game

[04:43] every day would be recorded as a daily active user or DAU around 30 times in a month, but is still only one monthly active user or MAU. To figure out how

[04:55] many of those MAUs are DAUs, we need to know the stickiness of those games. Stickiness is a measurement in business of how successful any given product is at getting its users to repeatedly engage with it. A simple calculation for

[05:09] the stickiness of a game would be its daily active use account divided by its monthly active use account. For example, if a game had 10,000 DAUs and 100,000

[05:21] MAUs, it would have a stickiness of 10%, meaning every month around a tenth of players logged in every day. That means if we don't know the DAUs, but we know the MAUs and we have an idea of how sticky these games are, we can calculate

[05:35] that missing statistic. Now, a game stickiness is going to depend on the Microsoft such as Activision Blizzard's World of Warcraft and King's Candy Crush Saga that heavily incentivize players to return to them over and over again and

[05:50] therefore likely have a relatively high stickiness as opposed to something like Double Finds Keeper, which is a game you can complete in a couple of hours. Since we're being generous, let's use a high stickiness of 20%. That would give

[06:04] Microsoft a daily active user account of 100 million gamers. Again, a game that can retain a stickiness of 20% every month is on the highest end of

[06:16] retention. So 100 million is a very liberal calculation and still only a tenth of a billion. Xbox has grand ambitions to grow its daily active users, which in a prior letter to the company from Sharma was cited as the

[06:31] brand's new north star. It hopes to accomplish this, focusing predominantly on its most popular IP, publishing those titles faster while turning its most prevalent games into bigger market competitors with a report from GameFile

[06:46] stating that Sharma is looking toward DAU juggernaut Roblox as a source of inspiration. In February of this year, Roblox published a report that cited the platform's daily active user count at 144 million. Microsoft has never

[07:01] confirmed Minecraft's daily user count, but third party analytics have the game peaking at a little over 60 million daily active users in 2025. If accurate, that would mean Minecraft would need to double its peak DAU count to be in the

[07:16] realm of where Roblox is operating. Therefore, in the spirit of generosity, let's say in the future, Microsoft is able to double how many players are engaging with its games on a daily basis across the board. and DAUs get to 200

[07:31] million. Again, using the very beneficient 20% stickiness statistic. that's playing games. There are other ways Xbox can entertain someone. The

[07:43] Fallout TV show has been very successful for the brand. With distributor Amazon claiming that in the first 13 weeks of release of its second season, 83 million people tuned into the program. Let's say Xbox was able to have streaming

[07:56] successes like that all year round with shows like the animated Gears of War in the works at Netflix. That would only add on the most generous end an average of around a million people a day. And that's only if there's a neverending

[08:12] string of successful Xbox TV shows being released. Another successful project was nearly a billion dollars at the global box office over the course of its theatrical release. If you divide the movies box office by the average price

[08:26] of a ticket, we're looking at a rough estimate of a 100 million people. If Xbox were to have a project like that come out every quarter, that would on average result in only around another million people every day. Let's look at

[08:41] engagement with Xbox Online across all of the brand social platforms. It's sitting at around 70 to 75 million followers currently. If everyone that followed Xbox across all its various online outlets engaged with something

[08:55] from the brand every day, whether it be a trailer, live stream, or meme post, that would give Xbox a boost for this stat that we're trying to build toward, but it's still ultimately a drop in the bucket. A big drop, but a drop

[09:09] nonetheless. And many of the people following Xbox on one platform also follow them on another. So, the amount of daily active users you could count from this is actually much smaller than that 70 to 75 million number. Plus, the

[09:24] parameters for entertaining someone are being stretched incredibly thin at this point. There are other points of engagement we could bring up. skins in merchandise like hoodies and action

[09:38] figures, third-party hardware sales from brands such as 8-bit D and Turtle Beach, and people buying the Minecraft movie digitally or on Blu-ray. But again, the quantities we're talking about needing to pump Xbox's numbers to that billion

[09:51] to pump Xbox's numbers to that billion mark are in no way shape or form realistic. Like the companies that do cater to a billion people daily, Xbox's touch point for entertainment is going to be driven by its core business of

[10:05] games, which is a small slice of a larger market that is growing incrementally year-over-year. If Xbox is to entertain a billion people daily, we

[10:17] to entertain a billion people daily, we won't see that occur for a long, long won't see that occur for a long, long time. And that's if the market doesn't suffer a major crash. If this video has felt absurd to you, that's because it

[10:30] felt absurd to you, that's because it is. I felt absurd writing it. An absurd video for an absolutely absurd statistic. But absurd has become the new normal for the gaming industry with record layoffs and studio closures,

[10:44] multi-million dollar live service projects that are shut down in the blink of an eye, surging component costs that are making it much harder for people to own hardware and generative AI. The same tech that is driving said component

[10:57] costs being looked toward by many in the industry that control its purse strings as some kind of magic wand that is going to fix the woes of game development. Unfortunately, operating in the absurd has become an incredibly effective tool

[11:13] in modern times to drum up investment for a company, particularly in the tech sector. The world's richest man, Elon Musk, has used it for all of his business ventures. His company, SpaceX, having recently gone public with the

[11:28] goal of putting thousands of people in a lunar colony and building data centers in space over the next 10 years, despite the fact that he had previously claimed we'd already have people visiting Mars by now. Adam Newman, the man behind Wei

[11:43] Work, is famous for saying a lot of truly outrageous things, including the fact that he wanted the business Wei Work to be the new family of 150 million orphans around the world. Newman's eccentricity was a lightning rod for

[11:59] investment into Weiwork for many years, with the CEO of the company's primary investor, Soft Bank, telling Newman that he had been quote not crazy enough. that he had been quote not crazy enough. that CEO Masayoshi is also the same person

[12:14] that recently said, quote, "It's blasphemy against AI if you say it's a intricacies of the business reality that Xbox finds itself in, but it's hard to imagine Xbox needing to entertain a billion people every day for it to be a

[12:30] successful business. However, I do think those running it need to be realistic about its prospects. Unless the plan really is, as some outlets have reported, to spin it off or find some other corporation to take it off of

[12:44] Microsoft's hands, in which case that billion people entertained metric is not a sign of the brand's potential, but of its desperation.