Following Microsoft 's Q1 2026 financials, which reported yet another quarterly decline for the Xbox division and most importantly registered CEO Satya Nadella 's mandate that Xbox return to growth in the next fiscal year, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has once again posted a memo.
This time, she didn't make it public, but it leaked anyway via The Verge . It features four main tenets:
- CORE: Strengthen our platform, led by console
- CONTENT: Grow great games into global franchises
- CREATION: Make Minecraft the world’s creator platform
- CONNECTION: Extend the worlds that fans love
We largely already knew about items one, two, and four; the biggest surprise is arguably the third one. It sounds like Xbox wants to try and take on Roblox with Minecraft , though that'll be far from easy; today's quarterly report reveals that Roblox recorded a 36% revenue increase to $1.5 billion , and a 10% increase in average daily active users, which reached 123 million thanks to growth in Asian countries like Japan and India. We don't have official figures for Minecraft, but third-party statistics trackers suggest Microsoft's family-friendly franchise may be around half that number at best.
Those four tenets are rather vague, though. Sharma also outlined three concrete expansion stages for Xbox : the first is to follow Nadella's direction and return to growth in fiscal year 2027; the second is to "move those four Cs and roadmap into businesses producing meaningful player value and revenue acceleration" in fiscal years 2028 and 2029; lastly, the third stage will be reaching half a billion daily players by 2030 thanks to "double-digit growth in players and engagement and industry leading margins".
That's a long, long way off. In the memo, Sharma says the Xbox ecosystem currently has over 100 million daily active users, over 500 million monthly active users, and nearly 1 billion yearly active users. So, Xbox somehow has to turn its monthly active users figure into its daily active users figure over four years . Good luck!
As a side note, Sharma revealed that three franchises generate over a billion dollars annually . Two are certainly Call of Duty and Candy Crush from Activision and King; the third could conceivably be Blizzard's Warcraft , mainly due to World of Warcraft and Hearthstone.
About the author : With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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