Xbox Can’t Meet Ridiculous New Goal Of ‘Entertaining’ 1 Billion A Day Even If We All Boot Up A Call Of Duty Right Now

Today, Xbox announced it would be laying off approximately 3,200 individuals—roughly half of them today, the rest throughout the year—as the company undergoes “the most significant restructure in Xbox history.”

This devastating move is seeing multiple studios cut loose, teams reorganized, and livelihoods lost, all because, according to Xbox, the business is “operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses.” The many, many studios Xbox rushed to acquire in recent years have not been profitable enough to warrant Xbox’s continued investment, so it’s shedding as much as possible while seemingly preparing to pour the saved money into what remains: whatever games that Xbox thinks will turn big profits.

CEO Asha Sharma is calling this a “reset” for Xbox. And she shared a very specific, quantifiable goal for this move:

“I want XBOX to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect. I know we can achieve this goal. XBOX has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history, talented studios around the world, and we will return to growth in 2027.”

One billion per day! That seems like a big number! One billion of anything is nigh unfathomable to most people. A lot of people are pointing out the absurdity of this number, but it got me curious: Xbox is now going to be operating with fewer games, and far fewer people. What would it actually mean for Xbox to achieve one billion daily active users? Can it?

Well, for starters, there are approximately 8.3 billion people on planet Earth, a number that includes newborn babies, the very old, and loads of people who live in places where it is impractical or too expensive to own an Xbox, or where Xbox doesn’t even operate. So Sharma wants a little less than one-eighth of the entire world’s population to be a part of the Xbox ecosystem, daily.

It is absolutely believable that a billion people would use a piece of technology every day. Google, for instance, doesn’t publish its DAUs, but almost certainly pulls in a DAU count in the multi-billions. WeChat is also estimated to be up over a billion per day. Meta, as of its last earnings call, boasts 3.5 billion daily active users across all its major services: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, and so forth. That’s split across several services, sure, but Xbox’s goal would similarly be split across multiple games and games as a service.

Admittedly, though, Meta is an outlier. No other tech company comes close to its DAU count. A bit more realistically, as of 2023, there are 3.2 billion gamers in the entire world. So Xbox is aiming to have a little less than one-third of all gamers using something Xbox-related every single day. When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound totally implausible, I guess. Xbox is a part of Microsoft, which makes Windows PCs, so it’s really capturing two audiences. Three, add in mobile gaming, because Xbox also owns King, which makes Candy Crush, while Minecraft and Call of Duty and a few of the company’s other games are also on mobile, plus cloud gaming. Oh, and there are some Xbox games on both PlayStation and Nintendo, too! So okay maybe, across all of these platforms, Xbox could get up to a billion folks per day.

Let’s think about Call of Duty, which is Xbox’s most popular gaming property by far. As I write this, Warzone has about 38,000 people playing it on Steam, with an all-time peak of 491k. That’s just on one platform: it doesn’t count Xbox or PlayStation players, so the actual active number is probably much higher. But these are rookie numbers; even the most generous estimates don’t get the Call of Duty playerbase anywhere close to one billion. It might, maybe, on a good day, brush one million, of which there are 1,000 in a billion. Heck, as of last year, the entire Call of Duty franchise, from its very inception, had sold 500 million copies. So if every single person who has ever purchased a Call of Duty all busted out every copy of the game right now and played them all at once, Xbox would (I guess, technically, sort of, since loads of people own multiple Call of Duty games) be halfway to a billion in a day.

But Xbox doesn’t just have one game, it has many! Let’s look at some of its other popular games! How about Minecraft, what’s Minecraft contributing? Numbers on Minecraft are a bit fuzzy: it set a new DAU record last year on PlayStation and Xbox of 3.9 million DAUs following the movie release, but that was just on two consoles, and Minecraft’s on basically everything. In 2021, it was seeing 140 million monthly active users, and it has apparently sold over 400 million copies total. So if everyone who has ever purchased Minecraft at any time in their lives also got together and opened up the game all at the same time that the Call of Duty people were doing the same thing, we’d be inching somewhere in the direction of a billion, never mind that lots of people own both games but only count as one person.

Candy Crush? Candy Crush is huge. It’s been downloaded over 3.6 billion times. Over three billion people are not likely to be playing it every single day, though, nor even one billion, especially since some of those people downloaded the very first Candy Crush game waaaaay back in 2012 on a phone they don’t own anymore. The games had a peak monthly active user count…of 327 million. Back in 2015. And Sensor Tower data from late last year has Candy Crush at around 26 million DAUs.

There are plenty of other sources of user activity to mine here, though. Xboxes don’t just play Xbox games, they also play games like Fortnite, Roblox, Grand Theft Auto, and loads of ultra-popular sports games. Maybe it’s a better idea to take a stab at third-party stuff like this based on how many Xboxes have been sold. We don’t have a good number on that either, but analyst estimates from a couple of years ago put the figure at 28.3 million, and it’s probably risen at least a bit since then. So, uh, 30 millionish, again if every single Xbox Series owner turns on their consoles at the exact same time? Maybe a little more if you add folks who are still using their Xbox One or 360?

Agh. Somehow, we’re still not to a billion. Adding on a few more massive Xbox first-party games, we can get there only in the most generous terms. Forza Horizon 6 sold over 6 million copies, so lets add all those folks on, again ignoring the fact that they’re probably already counted somewhere above in either owning an Xbox or playing one of those other games. Halo Infinite had over 20 million players at one point. Sea of Thieves reached a whopping 40 million total lifetime players. World of Warcraft was estimated to have around 9 million active subscribers in November of last year. Its known peak subscriber count was 12 million, 16 whole years ago.

Okay, that gets us there. If every single one of those people all turned on their games at once, and assuming each counted as one individual person instead of one person across five or six different games, we’d be at a billion daily active users for Xbox.

This is a silly exercise! So let me serious it up a bit: in 2025, Xbox reported 500 million monthly active users. That’s across everything: Xbox consoles, mobile games and cloud services, and PC games. The company would have to double that number to reach its goals, and then have every single one of those users log in not just once a month, but once per day. This is not realistic. Xbox’s competitors aren’t even doing this. PlayStation averages 125 million MAUs currently, and Nintendo reports 128 million per year. More general entertainment companies aren’t doing this. Netflix has 325 million subscribers. You could maybe make an argument for Disney, if you counted literally everything it does, including its parks and films and Disney+ and buying a piece of merchandise. Roblox, which Sharma seems to want to emulate, called a one-billion-DAU shot two years ago. How many DAUs is Roblox reporting now? 132 million. It’s not even one-fifth of the way there.

I don’t know what any of this means. I do know that one billion people entertained daily is an absurd goal, and even more absurd when you consider again that Xbox is planting this flag at the same time as it is laying off thousands and saying farewell to several talented teams and franchises. Sharma claims that these cuts are in pursuit of growth: the company is going to invest more in things that will gain it users and profit, and stop investing in things that don’t.

These changes are about a bigger future for XBOX, not a smaller one. The next decade of gaming will be larger, more global, and more creative than anything we’ve seen before. This year, we’ll invest as much in XBOX as we ever have, but we’ll invest with greater focus, greater discipline, and greater clarity, all in service of making XBOX where the world plays and creates.

And for what it’s worth, I don’t actually think Xbox could have reached one billion DAUs by keeping any of these people, either. Not because it would have been a mistake to keep people employed. But because this is a ridiculous goal to set. People are being laid off in pursuit of the impossible. Self-admittedly, Xbox is profitable. A 3-percent profit margin is still profit. You can work with that. Intelligent people at that company could have envisioned a way out of its apparent operational tangle without depriving anyone of their livelihoods, or at least with a gentler impact than this. Instead, Xbox is being driven violently forward in pursuit of an impossibility, and at the expense of human beings.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t say impossibility. “Entertain,” after all, is a very broad category of things. Maybe it just means one billion people seeing an ad every day. Or, you know what does have a billion users? Windows. As of January. If Xbox needs to, I suppose it can use Windows and PC gaming to fudge the numbers and justify the havoc it has wrought. Even then, it’s going to have to do some real cooking. Steam’s concurrent user record is 41 million. Perhaps Xbox can say it has “met” its goals by forcing one billion of us to sign into Xbox every time we turn on our computers.