Fuck knows, probably not a whole lot, which is why they are making job cuts. Which they are also not supposed to do because they are a $3 trillion company. So we berate them for being barely profitable if at all, and also for making moves to be profitable.
I'm gonna point you to one of
Varteras
's posts because you'll see what it is about these cuts that a lot of us are actually questioning, not necessarily the cuts themselves...
If this would have happened two or three years later, and at a slow trickle of eliminations, it would have been easy to just handwave. I honestly think the industry in general would have been much more accepting of the idea that it was an attempt to streamline development and make it better. This is not that. This is a huge cost cutting measure mere months later. It is a blatantly heartless axing and the wild thing is it comes right after Microsoft fired over 10,000 people just last year. Even 6 months ago articles were being written about more layoffs beyond those 10,000. Meanwhile, the company hits a $3 trillion valuation, continues to bring in a couple hundred billion in revenue, and multiple tens of billions in profit. The only kind of people who can see nothing wrong with this are the people who are so willing to lock away their humanity that it should be grounds for court-ordered psychiatric care.
Yes, this. This is the heart of the matter. Cuts are always going to happen, especially with M&As this big. That is not necessarily what most of us are complaining about. The problem is
HOW Microsoft went about doing these layoffs and communicating them (or lack thereof) to the affected. When you've got employees not even knowing they've been fired until multiple failed logins to their Slack account, or calling up Jason Schrier to see if they've gotten fired (when that should be Microsoft letting them know), that is a massive problem.
Firing employees is already going to be rough, but to be as heartless and sloppy about it as Microsoft has been...and this isn't even the first time, either. But if people want to think we're making it about the cuts themselves, let 'em. Well, I know for my part that is somewhat the case, because much smaller companies appear much more humane about handling layoffs trying to cut back from the most secured in the company (usually in docking their pay, eliminating bonuses, or even demotions, etc.) before just rushing straight ahead to fire masses of the least secured among the workforce. Nintendo and Lenovo are two immediate examples I can think of in this regard.
Something about giving a person a job opportunity that requires them to relocate (perhaps even entirely cross-country), just to fire them a couple months later, just seem extremely messed up, heartless, and inconsiderate to them and their family, and their finances. But hey, Sting concerts amirite!?
Who knows. The reason why Sony does is because gaming is a separate pillar. Xbox isn't as it's lumped into a Computing pillar that has Windows, Search, and Mouse and Keyboard kind of stuff.
So nobody knows how profitable each thing is in the Computing pillar. Just as nobody knows how profitable each line in Sonys Gaming report. The profits of their Gaming division is one vague number, yet they split out hardware, software, add-on, online/network services in sales rows, but not profit rows. Maybe all rows are super unprofitable except Software. Nobody knows.
Apple doesn't state the profit of any of their hardware like phones, Macs and watches. All of it gets lumped into one hardware profit row. And all downloads and services get lumped into one Services row too. So out of all the products and services Apple sells, it's all vaguely combined into just two rows.
Sony may not report profit for each sector of their gaming division, but at least they provide
revenue for each sector. Microsoft doesn't even do
that much! With Sony, we know how much hardware brings in for revenue, peripherals, B2P game sales, MTX/DLC add-on content, subscription services etc. Yeah the profit is all of those lumped in, but again at least report the profit of their gaming unit.
Just because SIE is a subsidiary, doesn't mean Microsoft have to hide both the profit and revenue for Xbox even if Xbox is more a division lumped in with More Personal Computing.
I still believe a big part of the acquisition was an attempt by MS/XB to get COD away from Sony. They were in too deep and had to agree to the *laughable 10-year deal.
I hate it for people that are being laid off, IMO, a bigger issue is the way it is being handled. It is just a crap situation not knowing if you are going to be let go or not. Fuck Phil for letting it happen this way on his watch.
Oh a massive part of the M&A was about getting COD, and ABK, away from Sony. Just remember those leaked internal memos and emails. Remember how a lot of Microsoft's acquisition targets were companies with a known close relationship with Sony/SIE. They at least at some point, had the idea of isolating Sony from as many of their closest 3P partners as possible, by buying them up.
Doing that would prevent Sony from working with those 3P independently; from that point on Microsoft would be the middleman, and there is 0% chance Microsoft allows anything to happen between SIE and that now-acquired 3P to benefit PlayStation that doesn't at least result in the exact same benefits for Xbox. The ABK purchase was, at least in part, a way to force market parity between Microsoft Gaming/Xbox and SIE with a 3P asset. Although in the form of content delivery, that's resulted in a lot more multiplatform support of ABK content than MS initially wanted, they still have complete control over all business affairs involving ABK with outside parties.
Controlling the content and its distribution, and knowing most of the money made on rival platforms is enriching your own platform (a direct competitor to those other platforms), is still a big get for Microsoft. It's arguably the second-biggest reason to do the M&A outside of the immediate benefit of more persistent revenue for whatever division(s) it's meant to bolster. Now I don't know if internally, Microsoft's focus has truly shifted or not in terms of how they plan to leverage the acquired assets. Are they really going more fully multiplat/3P and de-emphasizing the hardware (or even getting rid of it completely), or is all of that just smoke & mirrors to misdirect people? We don't know, and won't know until some of the rumors start getting confirmed (or not).
Which is why the threat (I say this from the POV of a competitor to MS Gaming's Xbox brand; I'm sure MS themselves would see it as a benefit) of leveraging ABK and other acquired content as perhaps partial foreclosure in availability on rival platforms, but full foreclosure in market business dealings between the acquired 3P and rival platform holders, still exists on some level. Something I'm very weary of, because it still means mass consolidation as an attempt to squeeze out significantly smaller (at the corporate level) competitors and buy their way to market relevance & dominance, stability of the market be damned.
And it's especially pressing potentially, knowing none of this consolidation is off the merits of Xbox's own market success in the industry; Xbox division had and never will have anywhere near the capital to foot a $69 billion bill for M&A on its own accord. I doubt any of the Big 3 console brands could, in fact, but
ESPECIALLY not Xbox.
We know they spelt over 1 billion on gamepass last year, they lose money on every console. I don't think they make very much.
From an interview with Windows Central: Spencer also says that the company “has no plans to bring Game Pass to PlayStation or Nintendo;” earlier this week, Xbox CFO Tim Stuart said that Microsoft is interested in bringing Game Pass to “every screen that can play games” including “what we would...
www.theverge.com
Personal wild guess: it's probably $1 billion per FY in net profits from everything Xbox/Microsoft Gaming-related, over/under of $200 million.
So prob as low as $800 million per FY, or as high as $1.2 billion per FY at best. Whatever it is, it's very likely well within the MoE of their total FY net profit average (~ $62.66 billion for the past four FYs), within the lower side of it at that (between 1%-2%). That's assuming similar accounting practices as say SIE/Sony for their gaming subsidiary.
IMO FY net profits for Xbox
have to be somewhere around this little for shareholders to not care about the numbers being provided to them (or per-sector breakdown of different parts of the division when it comes to revenue).
www.microsoft.com
But then we will have people complain online that there are not enough jobs for them and nobody wants to hire them 
