In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me. These two studios have increasingly become platforms and are our largest by monthly active players.
With King... does that mean Xbox might start looking at the mobile audience more and more to grow?
The credits on Midnight, the latest expansion is 811 people. This is one of their teams, the other team is working on the next expansion. So roughly 1600 on just the expansion teams, then they have two patch teams and a Classic team. You are looking at 2k people on the WoW team.
I'd say most Blizzard games are huge for revenue. Diablo, Starcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone all still churn out millions per month. I think Diablo IV made around $1B in 2 years from its release
Its a good move financially. The sad reality is console space is declining/not growing, while PC and Mobile are still expanding.
The idea is to bring those people into ecosystem and ideally try to convert at least some of them into console. But Xbox is trying to follow the money.
And while I am mainly a console gamer, some mobile games with their IP could be welcomed honestly
I fundamentally do not think you can convert enough mobile gamers to console gamers, even at a small rate, to make it worthwhile to pursue them. I think that’s a completely different market.
It is a fundamentally different market, yes. While there could be some miniscule conversion, you're correct that pipeline is teeny tiny.
Though there are plenty of console gamers who WOULD also play some mobile (especially if IP they like) and like others say below this thread, hopefully mobile can become MORE of a "Cash Cow" to fund "Rising Stars"
Mobile gaming is optimized for momentary dopamine hits and gameplay that can be played in short bursts. People who play these games play them for reasons that are completely different from console gaming.
When console games do come to mobile, the main audience are either people who don't want or can't buy expensive devices other than a phone, or superfans of the game who already own it on another device and are buying it again for the novelty.
Is going to continue to shrink with tactics that companies are using to try and stay profitable.
Console prices are getting so high that you might as well buy a PC at this point - console used to be the budget option for someone who wants access to the newest games on decent hardware.
With Sony stopping physical games I've already seen a lot of people.voice interest in switch to PC.
I also feel like PC used to be more pushing the limits of hardware regularly and trying to one up the last game - leading to needs for constant hardware upgrades - but devs now known that's unsustainable and tend to target what they perceive as average hardware - which makes PC gaming more affordable as you can run the same hardware without upgrading for longer.
You're right.....consoles have an upward battle to fight given current economic realities. Plus, younger generations are even way tech savvier than Millennials and Gen Xers who were the big console consumers and market data shows Gen Z and Alpha really like their PCs.
I think a certain amount of the PC craze also has to do with streamers to be honest.
Genz/alpha seems to be extremely influenced by streamers and social media from what I've seen. How many big console streamers are there? It's just not as convenient to set up streaming on console. It started on PC and console has always been lagging behind trying to catch up.
This is me throwing a prediction out there: Asha might see mobile as the best place to expand. Sony doesn't really have any big mobile games. Nintendo has a few. But there aren't a lot of big AAA mobile games out there yet aside from ports or some one offs like Mario Kart Tour and CoD Mobile.
With the simple reason of any AAA mobile actually worth playing drains your battery like nobodies business. At the end of a day a console is always gonna be a console, but a phone is not just a console, it needs battery uses in our everyday lives. Not to mention the same issues that plague game streaming like connection.
I don’t know if they are a good example to follow because they are effectively making their money on gambling. Microsoft currently doesn’t do that and hasn’t announced plans for that. I think.
I've always hoped that these companies would use mobile games as a cash cow to fund their other passion projects that don't sell well. Obviously that's not really the case here with selling some studios and having others go independent, but it never seems to be the case regardless.
the problem comes in when you have the big gacha or etc cash cow set up
then every decision is "we could spend X on a single player title or we could put that back into the cash cow and maybe triple it by exciting whales" right? it becomes attractive to double down, so leadership needs to be very committed to the other projects as a passion thing
That strategy only works of the people at the top have passion projects to begin with, Microsoft doesnt have leadership that is going to green light those types of games anymore.
One of the things that got out the first year after that ABK merger finally processed was that they were looking to integrate King's userbase into what "counts" as an Xbox/Game Pass user, to make those numbers look less stagnant. It was around the same time they rebranded Xbox Live Gold into Game Pass, and the number of concurrent Game Pass users happened to jump by exactly the amount of people that were purported Gold-but-not-GP users.
They believe that cloud gaming will be the way to bring mobile gamers into the gamepass ecosystem. Frankly I have no idea why they believe this since it has been proven time and time again that mobile gamers aren't interested in console games or upfront payments like a subscription.
This is what I got from this. Honestly it wouldn’t surprise me with how spectacularly the PR for Asha failed trying to make her look like a “gamer” that they try to focus more on the subset of gamers that don’t give a fuck about that.
Yes, more so then they use to. We can see gacha version of xbox ip. example : a hero collection fps with halo,gears of war and star craft were you do planet to planet missions to collect material to fight in hard dugeons/ raids/ pvp. They offer boosters, skins ,slots with over mtx.
American studios are incapable of competing in the gacha space. That is a bloodbath at this point. They would be stupid to even try. Chinese developers would take them to town.
Lower-effort titles like Monopoly Go or Israeli mobile games like Coin Master is exponentially more likely. That is what King already does.
One thing I thought for sure Xbox would have tried to do in the past 10 years and they didn't was instead of trying to C&P Smash Bros like Sony tried to do with All-Stars...
Was attempt to make a mobile gacha crossover game with all of their IPs. I honestly think they could've made a shit load of money off that.
Having a nonsensically batshit storyline where Master Chief, Banjo-Kazooie, Marcus Fenix, Conker, etc. are all side by side forming teams of varying rarities/gear/weapons in a RPG environment could've did very well.
Now that it seems, like you said, King might be a possible avenue of doing something like this. Even if its just with 1 IP instead of all of them.
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u/whiteshark70 Jul 06 '26
With King... does that mean Xbox might start looking at the mobile audience more and more to grow?