Anish Moonka@AnishA_Moonka
Your Game Pass subscription jumped 50% five months ago. Went from $20 to $30 a month. And now Microsoft’s brand new Xbox CEO is already talking about making it cheaper again. That whiplash tells you everything about where Xbox actually is right now.
Asha Sharma took over in February, replacing Phil Spencer. She’s never worked in gaming. Not one day. She ran Microsoft’s AI platform before this. Before that she was running operations at Instacart (the grocery delivery app), where she helped take the company public and make it profitable. And before Instacart, she ran Facebook Messenger’s product team and grew it to billions of users. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella picked her for one reason: she’s good at getting more people to use things.
First thing she did? Killed the “This Is An Xbox” campaign, the one that tried to call everything from Amazon Fire TV sticks to laptops an “Xbox.” Then she started looking at the price tags she inherited.
The numbers explain why. Xbox console sales dropped 70% compared to the year before in November 2025. That was the worst month for US console sales since 1995. The holiday quarter was ugly too: Microsoft’s gaming business brought in $5.99 billion, down 9%, and console sales specifically fell 32%. For context, the Xbox Series X/S has sold about 34 million consoles since 2020. PlayStation 5 has sold 89 million. Game Pass has roughly 34 to 40 million subscribers, though Microsoft stopped sharing the exact number two years ago.
The Netflix part is where this gets wild. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said he and Sharma have been tossing around ideas for a joint subscription bundle. Netflix has 325 million subscribers. They’re already streaming games straight to people’s TVs. Their cheaper plan with ads ($7.99 a month) reaches 190 million viewers, and those ads made Netflix $1.5 billion last year. They’re aiming for $3 billion this year. So think about what each side brings to the table: Xbox has hundreds of games and the tech to stream them. Netflix has 325 million living rooms. Each one has exactly what the other one needs.
Quick math on what a bundle might look like. The cheapest Game Pass tier costs $10. Netflix’s ad plan costs $8. Package them together at $15 and both companies suddenly reach people they never could alone. Netflix gets games that give subscribers a reason to stick around. Xbox gets its library in front of 325 million households instead of 37 million.
Nadella didn’t go looking for a gaming person. He went looking for someone who knows how to grow a customer base. That’s literally all Sharma has done her whole career, from Messenger to Instacart to Microsoft’s AI tools. The cheaper Game Pass and the Netflix conversations are the same bet: Xbox is becoming something you can use on whatever screen you already own, whether Microsoft made it or not.
