Following XBOX Games Showcase and FanFest, there are harsh realities that must be faced for XBOX fans.

XBOX CEO Asha Sharma called for a “100 Day Reset”, where she opens up about the challenges her and her team have been facing recently regarding pricing. Sharma takes time to praise her team for their dedication and the work being put into the company, such as the platform team shipping more updates in the last 100 days than “the prior year combined”, having the most active XBOX partners ever, a 24/7 channel open to players, creators, and developers for feedback, and more.

However, there is a glaring issue that must be addressed, and Sharma does not want to try to hide the truth from fans. Though the company invests highly each year, this year being $20 billion in “content, platforms, and hardware subsidy”, they continue to lose money.

Not only this, but XBOX relies on vendors to operate their systems, something they are choosing to move away from and aiming to become more independent. The systems are “overly complex”, and Sharma wants to increase the value while decreasing the time it takes to produce products for fans.

The components crisis the entire industry is facing is no help either. The XBOX team believes they have been affected by this crisis more in comparison to other companies due to the choices they made regarding hardware. Unfortunately, this impacts fans by there being a higher demand than supply for consoles.

We are in a hardware component crisis. When I joined as CEO in February, the price we paid for console storage components was over 2x as high as we paid last fall. These costs have since doubled again. And as we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase, taking us over 5x the prices we paid only two years earlier. Memory costs have followed a broadly similar trajectory.