Now that the waters of the Summer Game Fest are beginning to calm down, Asha Sharma and Matt Booty take the opportunity to look to the future of XBOX, and they do so with a letter sent to all employees, also published on the official website, announcing a reset of the XBOX strategy in the next 100 days. Here it is translated entirely into Italian.

Dear Team,

In the first 100 days we spent together, we started to breathe new life into Xbox.

Our dedicated platform teams have already released more updates in the last 100 days than in the entire previous year. We now have more active partners on Xbox than ever before. Our Game Pass team has been hard at work improving our offering, and after more than 8 months of decline, our service has started to grow again. And thanks to Player Voice, we have a 24/7 channel to hear directly from players, creators, and developers.

With the XBOX Games Showcase and the return of FanFest, we've brought together hundreds of millions of fans around the world. We've reintroduced exclusives with Gears of War: E-Day in 2026 and Clockwork Revolution in 2027. Players can continue to expect top exclusives from us every year. At the same time, Playground Games reminded us that established franchises can reach incredible new heights.

These results are just the first, but they demonstrate what can be achieved when we act faster, stay close to our community, and align behind a shared vision. We have made mistakes and we will continue to make them, but what matters is that we listen, learn and change course where necessary. Remember, our fans are rooting for us.

Now we start the next 100 days. It's important to have both optimism and realism as we work to reorganize the company.

Here are the realities we face:

#1: Every year, over a billion players choose to play on Xbox and our games, totaling 72 billion hours on console, PC, mobile, and streaming (excluding much of China and some other properties). Our franchises are also some of the biggest and most loved globally and are now breaking records on TV and film. In the future, our competition will be attention. There are more great games, TV series, franchises, creators, content formats, apps, etc. than ever before.

#2: We will close this fiscal year with a profitability margin of about 3%, down from the previous year. Excluding Activision Blizzard King, we've spent over $20 billion over the past five years on ongoing investment in our content, platform, and hardware subsidies, but our annual revenue has declined by nearly half a billion over the same period. In the future, this situation cannot continue.

#3: We are going through a crisis of hardware components. When I took office as CEO in February, the price we were paying for console storage components had more than doubled what we paid last fall. Since then, these costs have doubled again. And as we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase, which will lead us to pay more than five times the prices we paid just two years earlier. Memory costs followed a substantially similar trend. While the entire industry is facing a component crisis, we believe we have suffered more than many of our competitors due to the choices we have made over the past five years. We are currently unable to produce all the consoles that gamers would like to buy, and we need a new business model and hardware partnership, as we remain committed to Helix.

#4: We expanded our studio system when we needed a content pipeline to accommodate multiple subscription, streaming, and device strategies. In the process, we've found ourselves doing too much while implementing evolving strategies in a more readily available content landscape. We are the lucky custodians of industry-defining franchises, with huge potential and high demand from players, but we have not funded them adequately to compete and win. At the same time, as we saw last weekend at Showcase, a reliable stream of exclusive and third-party titles and new intellectual property is critical to our success. We need to reassess the balance between these and our investment priorities for the next 5 years.

#5: Our current platform infrastructure is not prepared for the challenge ahead. Our systems are overly complex and involve hundreds of dependencies, which hinders our ability to act quickly. We have become too dependent on suppliers to manage our systems, and we need to become more self-sufficient as an engineering culture to build the future. We need to increase the value we offer to players while reducing the time it takes to do so. Moving forward, we will evolve and rebuild our stack and examine the capabilities of all of XBOX and potential mergers and acquisitions to help us win in the hardware, PC, mobile, and streaming industries.

For some of you, discovering these realities will be surprising and even frustrating. We will not succeed by hiding the hard truths, nor will we succeed by doing the same thing and expecting different results. Like the "daily wins" mentality of the first 100 days, we will sprint to progress together on hardware, content, experience and services.

XBOX is one of the few places where people come to not only play games, but to connect with others and make memories. With the console at the heart of how our flagship experiences are defined, Windows as one of the biggest gaming platforms in the world, and incredible games under our roof as one of the biggest publishers in the world, we've got the foundation right.

Let's start over for a stronger XBOX and build the number one company in the gaming and entertainment industry.

Asha and Matt

What do Asha and Matt's words actually tell us? Trying to understand what is actually written between the lines, this letter is about becoming aware of a business model that is now unsustainable for XBOX. With revenues falling despite billionaire investments and a component crisis that threatens to multiply memory and storage costs by up to five times, the old system that saw hardware subsidized by the manufacturer to absorb its costs, seems to have come to an end. To ensure the future of the Helix project and meet demand, we will have to expect a completely revised commercial approach and new strategic partnerships, probably with OEM manufacturers who will enter the field to make different versions - and at different costs - of the new console.

And the two executives make us understand that this cost rationalization will inevitably also affect the content sector and the technical infrastructure. The expansion of internal studios has created an oversized structure that has taken resources away from historical franchises, now ready to be refinanced to compete at the highest level. The focus will shift to quality and high-profile annual exclusives, as confirmed by future Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution. At the same time, the entire platform infrastructure will be rebuilt internally to reduce dependence on external suppliers, accelerating updates and better integrating the ecosystem, perhaps without excluding targeted acquisitions to dominate mobile and cloud as well.

In short, this transparency shown on margins and costs marks the beginning of a consolidation phase that aims to increase the efficiency and sustainability of the XBOX business, and this could also lead to painful choices such as layoffs, which has already been leaked in the last few hours. The hope is that these sacrifices will be able, as Asha and Matt hope, to bring XBOX to the top of the entertainment world. We just have to wait to find out if this will really be the case!