Every few weeks, tvPH uploads another video burying XBOX. Game Pass "failed," Phil Spencer "dug his own grave," the brand is "done in Brazil." And he's not just some random voice: PH has been a journalist and producer since 2003, with a track record at outlets like The Enemy, UOL Jogos, and Editora Europa's publications — which is exactly why what he says carries more weight. The problem isn't that PH lies: it's that he tells half the story, and tells it with the confidence of someone who already closed the case. Here's the other half, with numbers on the table.
"Game Pass failed"
It's PH's most repeated thesis, and it has a real basis: after the Activision Blizzard deal, Microsoft set an internal goal of 77 million subscribers by 2026, and according to a Wall Street Journal report, the real figure sits at barely 30 million, well short of that target.
left: just one thing (xbox game pass) center: game pass got worse right: is this tying sales?
The verdict never changes
But "missing an inflated internal projection" isn't the same as "failing" as a product. The numbers vary by source: other reports from early 2026 cite more than 37 million active subscribers, with year-over-year growth near 10%. Microsoft hasn't published official numbers since 2024, so the real figure is likely somewhere between those two. But even in the most pessimistic scenario (30M), Game Pass remains, by far, the largest video game subscription service in the world — something no competitor, not PlayStation Plus Premium, not EA Play alone, has matched. A business that misses its most ambitious target is still, in absolute terms, a massive success at scale.
On top of that, the company already reacted: it recently cut prices specifically to reignite growth. That's the opposite of a company abandoning a failed product — it's a company correcting course.
"XBOX went third-party, and that's a betrayal"
PH presents it as a blanket surrender. The reality is more uneven: Forza Horizon 5 sold more than 5 million copies on PS5, and Sea of Thieves sold close to 2 million — genuine wins that squeezed fresh revenue out of a game already paid off years ago. But not everything landed: Halo: Campaign Evolved, the first Halo game ever to reach PlayStation in 25 years, flopped there — barely 1% of PS5 users touched it on launch day, with sales under 400,000 copies in July. XBOX itself already drew the conclusion: under new CEO Asha Sharma, the policy is being revisited, and Gears of War: E-Day is the proof — confirmed as a permanent XBOX and PC exclusive, with no PS5 version. It's not a full reversal — Forza Horizon 6 and Fable are still headed to PlayStation — but it is an admission that "everything, everywhere" wasn't always the right call. That's not a rudderless company. That's a company correcting course with data in hand, title by title.
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Always the same pattern
"Phil Spencer ruined what he built"
It's easy to judge, in hindsight, a console cycle marked by a pandemic, a chip shortage, global inflation, and an unprecedented studio integration (Activision Blizzard-King, the biggest acquisition in gaming history). The studio closures and layoffs — the same ones PH cites as proof of failure — are also the consequence of trying to digest that massive purchase in record time, not necessarily pure mismanagement. Leadership, in fact, has already changed hands: Asha Sharma took over as XBOX's CEO, and in July 2026 announced a restructuring that cut around 3,200 jobs and spun off four studios from the first-party lineup. Nadella called it "necessary surgery to reset the business for long-term growth," with a promise to return to growth in fiscal 2027.
"Phil Spencer Saved Xbox and Then Dug His Own Grave"
“What Went Wrong with Xbox?”
Same story, different year
And there's data PH doesn't usually put in the same video as his criticism: Satya Nadella confirmed in the mid-2025 earnings report that XBOX holds 500 million monthly active users across all its platforms and devices — a figure it had already been sustaining since 2024, when Microsoft first announced jumping from 200 million to that number after folding in Activision Blizzard King. In fact, in the very fiscal year that saw revenue decline, XBOX added more than 200 million new players. That's an ecosystem still growing its user base even while the financial numbers hit a rough patch — not a dying brand.
"XBOX is done in Brazil / its games lost their impact"
This is the point where the counter-argument is weakest on hard numbers — XBOX hardware sales really did crash in emerging markets, and it's a real problem Microsoft itself acknowledges. But it's worth separating two things PH tends to blur together: the health of the hardware (the physical console) and the health of the ecosystem (Game Pass, PC, cloud, services). Microsoft has spent years making it clear, with Satya Nadella at the helm, that it's betting on being a services platform rather than a box-seller. A console losing ground in a market like Brazil doesn't mean "XBOX is over" — it means the business strategy migrated, for better or worse, toward a different model.
The Prophet Needs the Corpse to Stay Dead
Give PH some credit here, because even a broken clock is right twice a day: the Game Pass price hikes were real and aggressive — up to 50% in some markets — the studio closures were genuinely painful for the communities affected, and fiscal year 2026 was objectively bad for XBOX financially: revenue down, another 3,200 layoffs, four studios off the map.
The problem is the business he built on top of that. A channel built on XBOX's funeral needs XBOX to keep dying every month, because the day it stops, the content dries up. That's why every inconvenient data point — the 200 million new players added in that same down year, the Game Pass price cuts, Nadella and Sharma's explicit promise to return to growth in 2027 — gets left on the cutting room floor, while any number that fits the script becomes the video's title. This isn't unlucky journalism. It's a thesis that needs to keep being right to keep an audience, and one the full picture keeps getting in the way of.
XBOX had a rough fiscal 2026, no doubt — falling revenue, painful layoffs. But still ranking as one of the three biggest video game operations on the planet by revenue — behind Sony and Tencent, but ahead of everyone else — with an ecosystem of 500 million active users that kept adding players even through its worst financial quarter in years, is a pretty comfortable rough patch for something that's supposedly been "ending" for two years running.
Being an XBOX fan in 2026 isn't denying the brand made mistakes. It's recognizing that "failure" is a word that comes a lot easier in a YouTube title than in an actual balance sheet.
