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[analog_future]

"Ended the Q as the top publisher by preorders and preinstalls on both Xbox and PlayStation Store."

Someone was paid really well to come up with that flex

 

[Mr Hyde]

Microsoft is on track to become a megaton publisher. Their current pipeline is ridiculously stacked. Good times ahead.

 

[Jaybe]

 

[QLQ]

The year of Xbox is upon us!

 

[QLQ]

That 8% increase isn't only gamepass.

It's probably most of it, but one has to remember they increased the sub prices so of course revenue goes up.

 

[Unknown?]

Just HOW much can hardware keep dropping?

 

[analog_future]

Just HOW much can hardware keep dropping?

I mean they're not actively trying to sell hardware anymore. It's going to keep dropping indefinitely because that's no longer what they're prioritizing.

 

[ShaiKhulud1989]

It's probably most of it, but one has to remember they increased the sub prices so of course revenue goes up.

CoD mtx on PS5 are now counting into MS revenue though.

 

[QLQ]

CoD mtx on PS5 are now counting into MS revenue though.

not just mtx on PS5, all sales on PS platforms of all MS IPs.

 

[Kerotan]

Those are absolutely dog shit numbers. You put Call of Duty, the biggest franchise on Gamepass and all you get is an 8% increase.

It's only a matter of time before the execs say "enough is enough"

That's just the reality.

Gamepass on PC "might" gain traction if it were on Steam, but even then I don't think anything would change.

This year's cod will be far smaller then BO6.

 

[mckmas8808]

Q4 YOY is going to look insane, last year it was a wasteland for Xbox with only Hellblade 2 launching, this year they have Oblivion + PS5 ports.

Also PC Gamepass seems to be up 45% yoy, that's a massive success.

So what does that say about GP on Xbox consoles?

 

[mckmas8808]

I mean they're not actively trying to sell hardware anymore. It's going to keep dropping indefinitely because that's no longer what they're prioritizing.

So why did they release a new Xbox hardware at the end of last year?

 

[LordOcidax]

Seems decent considering how bad things have been.

This… I am not expecting great results for Sony or Nintendo too for the past Q, we are going to see big drops in the hardware side.

 

[CoreyFlawless]

Goes up every year and everyone still complaining

 

[Mr Moose]

Where's all the people that told me revenue wouldn't be up this quarter?

People downplaying 5% growth per quarter as dog shit after last quarter, any company would love 20% revenue growth FY after last year was 43%. Easily the second largest company in the world in gaming besides Sony.

As a society we need to get over thinking about 'unlimited' growth of companies at an unprecedented rate and squeezing every last dollar a bit off topic, but this is how we end up with the huge layoffs from companies at the moment to keep shareholders happy. This comes from a large Microsoft shareholder… we've turned into a society that expect revenue to double every 12 months now.

Yeah we really need to congratulate MS on becoming a 3rd party dev, with PS helping them with that 5%.

5% gaming revenue increase is due to me buying Indy, Oblivion and Doom Dark Ages.

I think this is ending March, so won't include Oblivion.

 

[Hero of Spielberg]

Been a strong showing of games so far in 2025. Hoping this rumoured pc / console hybrid pans out as I'm in the mood for a new console that does something a bit differently and more importantly lets me easily play my PC collection in the living room.

 

[Mattyp]

If you grow 5% every quarter that doesn't mean you grow 20% a year.

There's 4 fiscal quarters every year, but yes correct the growth needs to grow in correlation to be more than the previous quarter now that revenue is increasing each quarter.

Basic point but was the majority of any company in the world will kill for the growth Microsoft has across all segments. Most companies are happy keeping with inflation.

 

[adamsapple]

This year's cod will be far smaller then BO6.

How do you figure?

 

[Codeblew]

That's not much of a jump after spending 68.7 billion.

 

[BennyBlanco]

Damn. Azure is huge.

 

[LordCBH]

Microsoft hurry up and announce a Gears trilogy remaster and I'll give you even more money

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

Only (some of) GAF would spin MS/Xbox growth as a bad thing, now content is finally hitting hard. Keep at it you salty motherfuckers, it's a delight to read while sipping a coffee. Good games is good games, wherever you find them. I find them via GP Ultimate, and a sprinkling of PC/console purchases too. Having a unified platform and family management/content sharing as well as games on tap combined with cloud saves or cloud gaming when away is just a lovely experience Xbox have curated these days.

I don't think gaming across cloud, PC and console (Xbox) has ever been so seamless and retained settings, saves, friends, chat, achievements etc. I take my Elite Core controller and use it on Xbox Series X, bluetooth to my phone and connect to me PC to game. The games, saves and friends chat all follows me. Pretty fucking solid whether I play Apex or anything else first/third party. I'm still happy to buy Xbox hardware over any other console.

Shocker I know GAF, we do exist.

 

[Kerotan]

How do you figure?

It'll be like MW3. It's a rush job cash grab not a full proper game like BO6. Big decline imminent.

 

[QLQ]

Only (some of) GAF would spin MS/Xbox growth as a bad thing, now content is finally hitting hard. Keep at it you salty motherfuckers, it's a delight to read while sipping a coffee. Good games is good games, wherever you find them. I find them via GP Ultimate, and a sprinkling of PC/console purchases too. Having a unified platform and family management/content sharing as well as games on tap combined with cloud saves or cloud gaming when away is just a lovely experience Xbox have curated these days.

I don't think gaming across cloud, PC and console (Xbox) has ever been so seamless and retained settings, saves, friends, chat, achievements etc. I take my Elite Core controller and use it on Xbox Series X, bluetooth to my phone and connect to me PC to game. The games, saves and friends chat all follows me. Pretty fucking solid whether I play Apex or anything else first/third party. I'm still happy to buy Xbox hardware over any other console.

Shocker I know GAF, we do exist.

umhuh...and then six months later... let's see Xbox at least keep sustained momentum for a whole calendar year. I don't see how they can prevent the well going dry by October-November.

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

umhuh...and then six months later...

Nah I've been playing a bunch of games via GP for years, kids too. Son branched out to PC, I returned to PC after decades of not really being in that space and just playing console and my wife/daughter have shared more gaming with me via GP than all previous years combined probably. When you have that ability to play various titles as part of the sub you buy what to keep, support devs or DLC etc. It's been awesome, even in the so called "bad content" times of the last 3 years. They don't all have to be AAA.

 

[QLQ]

Nah I've been playing a bunch of games via GP for years, kids too. Son branched out to PC, I returned to PC after decades of not really being in that space and just playing console and my wife/daughter have shared more gaming with me via GP than all previous years combined probably. When you have that ability to play various titles as part of the sub you buy what to keep, support devs or DLC etc. It's been awesome, even in the so called "bad content" times of the last 3 years. They don't all have to be AAA.

They don't have to be all AAA, but to keep people subscribed they'd better have must-play material basically all year round. It's cool to dip in one month here and there, but if that's what most people do, they're not helping the service thrive/keep it afloat. That's been the story of GP since the beginning, and not even CoD day1 on it is changing that.

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

They don't have to be all AAA, but to keep people subscribed they'd better have must-play material basically all year round. It's cool to dip in one month here and there, but if that's what most people do, they're not helping the service thrive/keep it afloat. That's been the story of GP since the beginning, and not even CoD day1 on it is changing that.

The new family plan is a solid strategy for keeping subs all year round e.g. your kids/partner play different games to you so you stay subbed each month/various content releases.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Cost of Revenue is a thing despite Microsoft pretending otherwise

It cost them $100 billion for a 5% revenue growth LMAO

Plus they always hide profit numbers by lumping them in with things which generate massive profits like cloud

 

[Hector Hall]

Isn't the price of game pass 15% more than last year? Probably have lost some subscribers but bringing in more revenue from the price increases (and vpn crackdown)

I think tus is exactly the case, the price increases amount for more that the estimated % increase, and they didn't mention any growth of subscribers, so subscribers may be down YoY.

5.7 billion for a quarter is great, until you remind that

1) it's Xbox+Zenimax +ABK
2) There are many Playstation and PC sales there, and Minecraft on Switch and Playstation and PC. Playstation was 63% of the software income Q2. Without Playstation we would be looking to bankruptcy. If you remove these other platforms from the equation, the Xbox numbers alone would be abysmal.

 

[QLQ]

The new family plan is a solid strategy for keeping subs all year round e.g. your kids/partner play different games to you so you stay subbed each month/various content releases.

I'm happy you're getting your money's worth. Let's see how that works out for them. Again, let's wait and see how they keep interesting for a whole year.

 

[Bumblebeetuna]

Numbers seem good. Top publisher by pre-whatever isn't that surprising, they have Indy and Forza while Sony and everyone else has fuck all until the end of the year.

 

[VGA-Games]

I really don't like that XBox Game Pass is responsible for killing physical Media on XBox Consoles!

But this XBox Game Pass is for various Reasons a fantastic Value for PC & Console Gamers!

 

[Rockman33]

If you grow 5% every quarter that doesn't mean you grow 20% a year.

You're right. It's actually more.

5% of 100= 105
5% of 105= 110.25
5% of 110.25= 115.76
5% of 115.76= 121.55.

So YOY you would actually grow roughly 21.55%

 

[tTHANOSs]

I mean how much decline can you get quarter after quarter, less than a million shipped in 3 months is Wii U category

Worldwide? If so that's bad.

 

[Radical_3d]

I'm in awe they still manage to get negative % of hardware revenue. Surely there must be a point where you can't go any lower.

 

[nial]

Numbers seem good. Top publisher by pre-whatever isn't that surprising, they have [late port] and [late port] while Sony and everyone else has fuck all until the end of the year.

hmm

 

[JohnnyFootball]

Sure, but there is still a shit ton of way to get GPU cheaper. Bing points and what not aside, plenty of third party key dealers are still selling keys for cheap.


Is'nt this the largest Q3 in Xbox History Revenue wise? I know you angle is to downplay gamepass and whatnot, but no exec would see those record numbers and think this is "bad".
Also, forgetting Gaming as a whole. this is just another division to MS, a whole other trillion dollar entity.

Profits > revenue.

 

[DryvBy]

Team Green needs to be praising Team Blue for sales. I still can't believe people think Xbox is going to do more hardware after the last 2 consoles have flopped this hard.

 

[yogaflame]

Looking at this, looks like MS box has really transitioned into 3rd party developer and publisher. Im okay with that, since in the past MS is a very good publisher and developer of 3rd party multiplatform games.

 

[QLQ]

Numbers seem good. Top publisher by pre-whatever isn't that surprising, they have Indy and Forza while Sony and everyone else has fuck all until the end of the year.

Sony is cashing in on every single 3rd party game released on their platform where the gross of the sales are made, like Indy.

 

[vaibhavpisal]

Too much crying over revenue/sales.

I know console wars have shifted to this from talking about games. Mainly cause gamepass means low first party game sales = easy win.

But that doesn't mean wins will come in quarterly reports.

In future as PS5 will saturate market, expect to see Xbox become biggest company in gaming.

 

[@gkTH]

MS: Much appreciate, Sony, thanks to allowing our games on PS5 !
Sony: Welcome to the Playstation family.

 

[QLQ]

Too much crying over revenue/sales.

I know console wars have shifted to this from talking about games. Mainly cause gamepass means low first party game sales = easy win.

But that doesn't mean wins will come in quarterly reports.

In future as PS5 will saturate market, expect to see Xbox become biggest company in gaming.

Gamepass means low sales all around on an Xbox platform, not only their own games.

If MS buys half the industry+1% that future may become true. Yay?

 

[Moriarty1889]

Not very good numbers overall at all imho.

 

[Little Chicken]

Pretty quiet in here, I guess the yoy growth at XBOX ruined some people's day

 

[Sephiran]

Xbox has really moved away from the traditional console model, it would previously be impossible to increase revenue when your console hardware sales are declining, that is what we still see from others like Nintendo, their revenue go up when they have more console sales and decline when console sales decreases.

 

[Bumblebeetuna]

Sony is cashing in on every single 3rd party game released on their platform where the gross of the sales are made, like Indy.

And thank goodness for that, eh.

 

[Killjoy-NL]

150M hours played over 3 months?

The average gamer spends ~10hrs a week playing games on average.
That's ~120hrs during a quarter.

So either only 1+M users use Cloud gaming all the time, or barely anyone really uses it.

Either way, pisspoor number.

 

[DenchDeckard]

Yes.

My brother!

Wow. They are seeing insane growth in gaming. This paints a completely different picture to what we read on gaf.

That's not much of a jump after spending 68.7 billion.

It's like a 200% uplift in revenue since 2019. And bigger than covid. Much bigger. It's a very strong performance.

 

[DenchDeckard]

Sony is cashing in on every single 3rd party game released on their platform where the gross of the sales are made, like Indy.

So, everyone is healthy. Great news. Ms now propping up Sony too

It's probably most of it, but one has to remember they increased the sub prices so of course revenue goes up.

Great point.

umhuh...and then six months later... let's see Xbox at least keep sustained momentum for a whole calendar year. I don't see how they can prevent the well going dry by October-November.

Yup. It's a bonkers first half for gamepass and ms. If they have more in the barrel for the second half, it could be their greatest year for first party and gamepass in a long time.

they must have plans for avoiding GTA but it would be great if they continue the momentum they've built so far.