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New CEO Asha Sharma is looking to push the reset button on Xbox.
"Hi there, good afternoon, welcome back to GRTV News, I'm Alex, as always going through the afternoons latest and greatest when it comes to gaming, technology, entertainment, whatever you like and indeed whatever you love, we always have it here for you at GRTV News and in the wider Gamereactor network as a whole, so if you like what you see and you want to see more, be sure to check out Gamereactor wherever you get it from for more gaming reviews, gaming previews, movie reviews, series reviews, exclusives, interviews, world news, sports news and of course so much more."
"Without further ado though today, I'm talking Xbox again, I talked to Xbox yesterday about the business getting healthier and it seems that Ashish Sharma's, or at least the entire Xbox strategy is going to be to do that via layoffs as of next month, we're in a bit of a weird state with Xbox right now where Xbox giveth and it taketh away, on the one hand we see Xbox giving out one hell of a showcase on Sunday which was a really really good showcase making us feel pretty hyped for the future and then on the other hand you see a lot of news about layoffs and stuff like that and then we get the Fable gameplay and then we get Ashish Sharma giving out a company wide email that seems to confirm that big changes are coming and big changes pretty much always leaves us with the idea of layoffs."
"So Bloomberg's Jason Schreier coming in with this report here that Xbox is planning major layoffs as soon as next month in July as new CEO Ashish Sharma is basically pushing the reset button on the business.
Now this shouldn't really surprise anyone, Ashish Sharma's been talking about pretty radical changes since she took over Xbox earlier in the year, bringing back things like exclusivity, bringing back the idea of Xbox as not just a publisher but a platform primarily, getting rid of the idea of anything can be an Xbox and talking about Project Helix as well as a bit of a game changer but Sharma as well recently has said things like don't expect maybe too much from Helix because of the way that the hardware industry is right now, it would be too expensive to make it a radical improvement on the consoles of yesterday."
"In any case, we see this also includes statements and an internal memo from Matt Booty who's the Xbox content chief who explained it in quite a candid way, which is quite weird almost, but he said, excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform and hardware subsidy but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time, going forward this cannot continue."
"So essentially it's kind of criticising the wanton spending of the administration of Xbox's past as it saw basically them buying up loads and loads of studios to become this really big publisher but the problem is that the big publishers, Xbox having all these studios does not necessarily mean that Xbox is making the most out of all these studios and as we've seen up until very recently where as I said last Sunday it really seemed like they were kicking things into high gear with a lot of these publishers, with a lot of these developers sorry, Xbox had been largely just delivering when it could and that wasn't constant enough to allow even PlayStation who'd been delivering one major exclusive a year to sort of run away with the ball."
"But he also says components are now costing more as I said before, something that Sharma touched on saying components today cost over five times what we paid just two years ago, memory costs have followed a broadly similar trajectory and says that we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix."
"Once again we're very sorry in advance that people are going to be probably losing their jobs because of this, major layoffs were announced, Xbox had major layoffs after the Activision buyout which cost like 80 billion dollars as well so it's really not looking good for people who are working at the company but it's the way that things are and we can't say that we're not used to and I hate the fact that we're getting numb to the idea of layoffs in the gaming industry but you can't say we're not used to them at this point but it just happens on such a major scale that it will probably be one of the main things that Ashley Sharma is known for in this first year of her tenure."
"Let me know what you think about Xbox's strategy going forward, do you agree with it, do you disagree with it, what do you think of the layoffs and I'll see you tomorrow for more GRTV news, goodbye."
