Two hundred and sixty-eight people lost their jobs at Xbox this week. They joined roughly 1,600 who had already been let go earlier this year, in what the division calls a “reset” and what its employees presumably call other things.

The reset, led by Xbox’s relatively new chief executive, Asha Sharma, has been thorough. Obsidian has been folded into Bethesda. Halo has been handed to Activision. Double Fine and Compulsion Games have been let go, along with State of Decay developer Undead Labs, and Ninja Theory, the studio behind Hellblade, is primed for closure. Sharma has defended the restructuring in aphorisms — “great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger” — a line PC Gamer described as the logic by which aeroplanes perform better with one wing ripped off.

This week the man above Sharma weighed in. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, touched on the Xbox cuts during a wide-ranging interview on the Sources Podcast with Alex Heath, as reported by Kotaku. He began with the assets. “I feel fantastic about the IP we have right now,” Nadella said. “If I look at the studios, the IP portfolio we have, and our ability to then take that and produce great games going forward, I feel fantastic.”

Of the layoffs, closures and cancellations themselves, Nadella spoke in the register of an engineer admiring a chassis. “There’s some amount of streamlining the team is doing, and Asha is doing, which is great to see,” he said.

Then we have to invent the right sustainable business model that allows us to deliver gaming to more and more people.

“That has always been the goal,” Nadella continued, “which is, we want to be a great publisher and a great platform provider to games across both PC and Xboxes. And so that is sort of our goal. And I think Asha and the team have said that Xbox is going to get growth in the next fiscal year.”

Read in sequence, the two statements describe an unusual order of operations: the most dramatic reorganisation in the history of Microsoft’s gaming division is now substantially complete, and the business model it is meant to serve remains to be invented. PC Gamer, extending its own metaphor, compared the approach to tearing off the wing first and then asking how one might circumnavigate the globe. Whether the sequencing is bold or backwards is a question the next fiscal year’s growth figures will answer; Nadella has already placed his bet.

What is certain is that the process is not finished. When the latest layoffs were announced, Xbox’s Chief Creator Officer, Matt Booty, said the company was “roughly three-quarters of the way through previously announced restructuring.” Three-quarters is a fraction with a remaining quarter in it. For the studios and staff still inside the streamlined organisation, that is the number that matters.