Looking at Xbox, You Can See Everything

Like many people who have watched Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s masterful documentary You Can See Everything, I sat down with my friend after our screening to bounce our thoughts off of one another. The film revolves around convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos who was criminally indicted for defrauding investors, and her husband Billy Evans, who met her some time after the charges against Holmes were made, picking up their story a month before her incarceration.

The documentary is about a lot of things, but at its core, the main question it posits is whether Holmes is a master manipulator or is being masterfully manipulated by the men in her life, with multiple parallels drawn between her husband Evans and her former partner, both romantically and in business at Theranos, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani. 

At the end of the conversation I was having with my friend, I came to the conclusion that it was a Schrodinger’s Cat kind of situation; Holmes is both a master manipulator and has found herself in partnerships with other master manipulators, and therefore, she is always manipulating but also always being manipulated, all at once. I then came to a more straightforward answer: You Can See Everything is about two people whose heads are so firmly up their own asses, and each other's asses, that they form an ouroboros, with no way to tell where one of them begins and the other ends. 

On the subway ride home from the theater, I was going over the news that I had missed in the day, including Microsoft’s latest financial report, which revealed that, once again, Xbox hardware revenue had declined year-over-year. Following this announcement, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma gave a similar explanation that she has used in the past, saying the reason sales were down was due to a lack of supply of Xbox consoles to meet demand.

In such close proximity to viewing You Can See Everything, a three-hour film that lays bare, quite literally in one scene, what delusion looks like, this comment from Sharma was the latest in a long line of quotes and business decisions that in the moment made me think, "Here is a company with its head very firmly up its ass."

At the time of this writing, if you live in the United States and go to Microsoft’s own online store, you can buy any iteration of either the Xbox Series X or S, new or preowned, and have it shipped in the next few days. Anecdotally, many of my colleagues and I have seen plenty of consoles, from each of the big three hardware manufacturers, in retail stores local to us. Many peers in the industry who live outside the US, such as former GameSpot editor Kevin VanOrd (Belgium), state that Xbox consoles are readily available for them, both online and in stores. In fact, I cannot find a single instance of anyone online claiming they cannot find an Xbox console.

One of the things that You Can See Everything fixates on, and was central to Holmes's cases, was her telling investors that the device Theranos made was able to test drops of blood for any disease. In Holmes' stated view, the Theranos device could do any blood test with one drop of blood eventually, once the technology for each test had been developed. In reality, when Theranos was courting investors, the device only had access to data for a dozen or so tests at that moment in time, and even then, there were numerous errors in its output.

Sharma’s exact quote around hardware is: “Console sales remain constrained by supply, with more demand than consoles available.” The most reasonable reading of this statement would be that any Xbox console that makes it to a shelf is being sold immediately due to incredible demand from consumers, and that the company cannot keep up the manufacturing pace. But there is so much readily available evidence to that not being true, so how else could this statement possibly be read?

Perhaps supply is not referring to the consoles themselves, but to the supply of components meant to make them. Despite all its money and power, even Microsoft must be having a hard time sourcing hardware to manufacture its consumer products as compute cost continues to climb due to vastly ramped-up data-center construction. Sure, there are Xbox systems on shelves, but it's probably more difficult for Microsoft to stock those shelves than it was a few years ago. 

And then there’s the part about there being more demand than consoles available. Technically, you could claim without a clear indicator, such as empty shelves, that the demand is there. Certain retailers have stopped carrying Xbox consoles, like Costco, citing “business decisions.” While there’s no clarity on what those business decisions are, it would be hard to imagine they would stop selling Xbox consoles if they were selling well. So perhaps there are people who do want to buy an Xbox, but nowhere locally stocks the hardware, not due to supply but a conscious choice on the part of the vendor. There could be a big group of people who desire to buy an Xbox but can’t because of affordability, as the consoles are now hundreds of dollars more expensive than they were nearly six years ago, when supply truly could not meet demand. This is, fortunately for Xbox, something you could claim, but it's impossible to prove.

Looking at these words in this light is an absolutely bizarre and unnatural way to read Sharma’s statement, but that doesn’t mean the argument for that interpretation couldn’t be made, much in the same way that Holmes claims she meant something completely different from what investors comprehended. Even in her explanation of the Theranos device to Fielder in the film, it takes tremendous pushback on the part of the documentarian to extract what she really means when she says the hardware "can" run any kind of test. And when he tries to get Holmes to understand how her words could be interpreted dissimilarly, and let’s be honest, more realistically, Holmes’ defense is that she just is different from, and thinks differently than, everyone else. Again, something that is impossible to prove.

In the film, all while Holmes prepares for incarceration, she and Evans are making plans for what Evans dubs Theranos 2.0. The film flits between numerous scenes of them discussing ideas, on phone calls with partners, and waxing poetic about the technology’s potential. This breathless montage feels eerily similar to the exhaustive changes that have occurred at Xbox in 2026. It hasn’t even been nine months since the announcement of Phil Spencer’s departure, and the company has laid off thousands of employees, closed or parted ways with several studios, overhauled its Game Pass subscription multiple times, pivoted Project Helix from a singular console to a “family of devices,” created Mythical Achievements, partnered with Hideo Kojima on his Physint project, walked back the company’s multi-platform ambitions, launched its disc-to-digital program, spun up the vibes-based Xbox Labs seemingly overnight, and of course the most impactful change of all, switching its branding from Xbox to XBOX.

While I will be the first to admit that Xbox needed a radical shake-up after Spencer’s lumbering, methodical, studio-absorbing reign, that revamp needed to be more akin to taking a few crucial, calculated shots with a sniper. While some choices have felt like that, such as the collapsing of the company’s bloated management structure, most of the decisions have felt more like panicked shotgun blasts you take immediately after ducking behind cover. In most games, those kinds of shots don’t get you very far, and according to industry analyst Mat Piscatella, the same is true for Xbox’s new strategy. 

“In terms of actual results, I’m not seeing anything right now. And I’m looking really hard,” he said in the latest episode of The Game Business. Even the calculated shots, such as removing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 from Game Pass to incentivize sales, haven’t panned out in the immediate, with Piscatella claiming the franchise has “lost a ton of engagement” due to that decision.

As Holmes and Evans enter the final days of the former’s freedom, the two discuss the logistics of how they’ll continue to have business meetings while Holmes is incarcerated, with the hope that they’ll have a working prototype of a new blood-testing contraption in under a year. It’s a moment that you watch with your head in your hands in disbelief. Surely no one could be this out of touch? How do they fail to grasp the reality of the situation they are in?

While Xbox, and to an extent the gaming industry at large, is more wounded than it has ever been, Sharma envisions a world where a billion people engage with the Xbox brand every day--a vision that, no matter how much I crunch or fudge the numbers, is nigh impossible to realize. As I write this article, a new Sharma quote hit the timeline from an interview on CNBC. “By Financial Year 2030, our ambition is to be halfway to our long-term daily-player goal with sustained double-digit growth in players and engagement and industry-leading margins,” said Sharma. To be confident in this wildly ambitious goal while the industry is going through an unprecedented, prolonged phase of uncertainty and instability is a crystal-clear example of the meme phrase, “You can just say things.”

Of course, internally, Xbox has access to a ton more data with which to build a clearer picture than those of us on the outside do. And the choice to hide that additional information is intentional. Back in the days of the Xbox 360, Microsoft used to reveal sales numbers for its consoles because they were selling well. That all stopped in the early days of the Xbox One, when it was clear that device was struggling.

Since Sharma became CEO of Xbox, there has been a new kind of transparency, however. For every major change at the company, she and chief content officer Matt Booty have publicly shared the emails they’ve sent to employees informing them of the next stage of Xbox’s reset. While there have been some hard facts revealed in those emails, like the brand’s recent margins only hovering at around 3%, the company only reveals so much to give the appearance of being transparent. 

Tangentially, the company is leaning much harder into engaging with followers on social media and making decisions seemingly based on their whims, such as the XBOX rebrand. There’s a huge difference between this behavior versus genuinely listening to your fanbase and internalizing feedback. The latter informs your decision-making, but shouldn’t define it. The former is nothing more than pandering to an audience: one that the company is all too aware will fight on the brand’s behalf on the social-media frontlines.

This window Xbox is offering into its new reset is almost like the company inviting you into its space and saying, well, you can see everything. However, despite gaining that level of access, there’s always the potential of masterful manipulation, because the truth is, you cannot see everything. You are not allowed to see everything, because if you did, things would be much clearer as to exactly what state the company is in. You can see everything, including the fact that you cannot. Therefore, it becomes impossible to discern fact from fiction, and ultimately, you’re left with the feeling that the company can’t even discern that difference for itself.