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MS Earnings Call - FY23Q2 |

Wooxsvan

Member

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poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
Installbaseforum. They got some data leaks and put together charts. PlayStation market share is increasing while Xbox is decreasing.
That doesn't mean that xbox sales are declining though, just that they are doing worse than playstation.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
lol at some people in here discussing a 2 trillion dollar company like they’re on their death bed cause their smallest division was down. I mean it’s expected there was no first party release all year except smaller games like grounded and pentiment.

None of this matters if XBox isn't moving the needle in the right direction on the stock price.

Investors don't like a bunch of money being thrown at something that isn't growing.

And CEOs dont' like their bonus being effected because a division isn't performing well, and they have metrics tied to it.

Releasing so few big games isn't some positive for the division either.. yes it explains some of why they aren't growing, but how do you explain them not being able to keep their production pipeline healthy? How does that bode well for the future? Not completing projects on time mean future projects start later as well.

And how do they improve that pipeline? Throw more money at it? More people? It's already a massive division workforce and cost wise.
 
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Not impressive but they had declines in their guidance. More than anything this will play as ammo for the console wars. I don’t think Xbox is panicking over it. Also with gamepass being sustainable and MS itself making over 50 billion in revenue (sick) Xbox can sustain loss. I see why they want the deal to close soon, COD on gamepass is skyrocketing numbers.
 
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I think everything reported is revenue so free trials and MS rewards wouldn't matter. It's not just subscriber numbers that's up. All we know is that an increase in gamepass revenue is slightly offsetting a bigger decline in content revenue to still result in an overall revenue decline in content and services.

Well if that's the case, and they've already said PC Game Pass is where they're seeing most new GP growth, then I guess they could have picked up 1-2 million on PC but their ARPU is not too high, that could explain why it wasn't enough to offset the other software revenue declines to at least keep the results flat or in a margin of error.


Thanks, I must've missed that. I must've been recalling a forecast they made back during their Q1, predicting Q2 trends for gaming hardware to be about flat YoY.

This isn’t affecting them in the least bit some are just using this to push Microsoft get rid of Xbox agenda nothing more. The division was performing fine when they had software to release I’m sure it will recover as the year goes on when they’re putting out games. To act like it’s the end times is absurd.

You guys are overestimating how much 1P sales & revenue count towards total gaming revenue for MS, even Sony. In Sony's record PS fiscal year so far (that may change this fiscal year), FY 2020 (IIRC), 1P software accounted for 18.5% of their total software revenue. That means even in that year, over 82% of the revenue came from 3P software sales.

So these results are really showing that there's been a notable decrease in 3P software purchases across Xbox consoles, and considering MS got most of the same 3P games Sony did this year (Elden Ring, Crisis Core, Strangers of Paradise, Saint's Row, MW2, MLB The Show, Callistro Protocol, Madden, FIFA, etc.), that should also be very worrying.

Because it's probably showing that Game Pass IS conditioning a good swath of Xbox owners to buy less games, not more. Or at least less new releases, which would account for the lion's share of 3P software revenue. Given Xbox software revenue is even more reliant on 3P sales than Sony (and both need that a lot more than Nintendo), it's a potentially concerning trend. Games that could probably otherwise be larger revenue generators through direct sales like RedFall and Starfield aren't going to be helped in that regard by being in Game Pass Day 1.

Game Pass is causing a problem where it's either sub revenue grows or general software revenue grows. But it can't be both, not when its main selling point is Day 1 games.

honestly it partially depends on the strength of the CEO, Nadella is currently pretty secure but obviously that may change and definitely there is no guarantee the next ceo will see the same value in gaming as Nadella does.

And Nadella was only sold on that because Phil convinced him Xbox could align with their wider services-orientated growth goals.

If that doesn't pan out (if Xbox doesn't see a big uptick in sales or revenue because of Game Pass), what will the next pivot sales pitch be? AI? I'd love to see how Phil Spencer sells Satya on Xbox's importance for AI, just to see what he would say.
 

Pelta88

Member
This is a disingenuous post.

Not impressive but they had declines in their guidance. More than anything this will play as ammo for the console wars. I don’t think Xbox is panicking over it.

XBOX Series S/X are two years into a generation and are already seeing heavy declines in units sold. Framing that very alarming fact as anything other than alarming speaks more to your intentions than the topic being discussed.
 

Jaybe

Gold Member
That’s a Starfield-sized hole in those numbers. Performance expected on content and services. They are comparing results against the quarter that had FH5 and Halo Infinite releases. Only their platform cut of the stronger COD sales helped offset. The hardware tanking is very bad to a degree that is surprising though we already had the NPD leaks on this one.
 
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poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
None of this matters if XBox isn't moving the needle in the right direction on the stock price.

Investors don't like a bunch of money being thrown at something that isn't growing.

And CEOs dont' like their bonus being effected because a division isn't performing well, and they have metrics tied to it.

Releasing so few big games isn't some positive for the division either.. yes it explains some of why they aren't growing, but how do you explain them not being able to keep their production pipeline healthy? How does that bode well for the future? Not completing projects on time mean future projects start later as well.

And how do they improve that pipeline? Throw more money at it? More people? It's already a massive division workforce and cost wise.
Windows OEM revenue was down over 30%. Think it's pretty obvious investors will be pushing for MS to shutter this failed windows project.
 

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
This is a disingenuous post.



XBOX Series S/X are two years into a generation and are already seeing heavy declines in units sold. Framing that very alarming fact as anything other than alarming speaks more to your intentions than the topic being discussed.
How heavy?
 
This is a disingenuous post.



XBOX Series S/X are two years into a generation and are already seeing heavy declines in units sold. Framing that very alarming fact as anything other than alarming speaks more to your intentions than the topic being discussed.
Again it's inline with people who make alot of money to follow trends 24/7 predicted would happen hence there is reasons as to why the decline has happened and was expected to happen. It's not good regardless but it's not going to cause panic. A year with no software and the competition has upped it's own stock. Next year should be better, and their main goal, gamepass has grown, probably not as much as they want but if that declined I'm sure they would be a bit more stressed especially given their strength on PC.

In summary

Not good, but not end of the world results
 

Dick Jones

Gold Member
Pretty stupid takes from the guy.
Ukraine is a grand travesty of human misery, and he’s on about exclusives? Then brings up… Bungie’s departure… from 2007??
I was more annoyed with his picking over the carcass of 343 IP on the day it got gutted. Wait a week or a day at least, people were fired (mainly due to cunts higher up in that developer)
 

Thirty7ven

Banned
One thing’s for sure, this just shows you why Xbox is going after AB hard. If they can’t get a game like COD on gamepass they won’t convert enough people into their ecosystem anytime soon and anybody who thinks Starfield is the silver bullet is smoking space rocks.
 
Pretty stupid takes from the guy.
Ukraine is a grand travesty of human misery, and he’s on about exclusives? Then brings up… Bungie’s departure… from 2007??
It’s pretty stupid when Microsoft’s own ceo said they broke all their engagement records for gamepass and monthly active users. I wonder why they’re having a hard time producing series x consoles.
 

Dick Jones

Gold Member
It’s pretty stupid when Microsoft’s own ceo said they broke all their engagement records for gamepass and monthly active users. I wonder why they’re having a hard time producing series x consoles.
I agree. Starfield is one game and while it will be long to finish, I think Gamepass is better suited to new shiny toys every month to keep subscribers attention. Anyone who wants a long Starfield type game will be buying it rather than rent via Gamepass
 
I agree. Starfield is one game and while it will be long to finish, I think Gamepass is better suited to new shiny toys every month to keep subscribers attention. Anyone who wants a long Starfield type game will be buying it rather than rent via Gamepass
I think they said their goal is smth like an exclusive a quarter, probably not AAA but maybe a starfield, pentiment, redfall, grounded kind of rotation, one yearly cod in there...thats the final vision, just need to get on a better development cycle and cohesion between studios. Sony does about two - three a year and are the gold standard currently.
 

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
This comment is painfully stupid.
Yes it certainly was - one of the incredibly dumb posters here was trying to use that kind of logic to argue that the Xbox division would be in trouble because investors who saw there share price increase after all this news and execs would be unhappy with the drop in revenue.
 

onQ123

Member
The biggest problem with the hardware decline is that it happened over the holidays with Series S being heavily discounted & a better stock situation than last year.

Now they have to get people to buy the consoles over the next few slow months & I don't think they have anything coming up in the next few months to help things out.
 

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
The biggest problem with the hardware decline is that it happened over the holidays with Series S being heavily discounted & a better stock situation than last year.

Now they have to get people to buy the consoles over the next few slow months & I don't think they have anything coming up in the next few months to help things out.
I still haven't seen anything that says that hardware did decline over the holidays though.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
Yes it certainly was - one of the incredibly dumb posters here was trying to use that kind of logic to argue that the Xbox division would be in trouble because investors who saw there share price increase after all this news and execs would be unhappy with the drop in revenue.
Nobody said that.

You might want to look at the specifics of what was said.

Which mirror everything MS has said about Xbox and its financial support for years. It’s about cloud scale profit and cloud gaming adoption contributing to high-margin Azure revenue.

Considering they were in trouble BEFORE adopting their new strategy why do you think it’s stupid to suggest they’d be in trouble if that strategy fails to reap rewards and the market doesn’t shift to cloud as expected?

I'm not talking about this year, or next.. I don't know how long MS thinks it will take for cloud to really take off (if it does.) What we do know is that GP being stagnant is directly effecting executive bonuses, and will likely ding them this FY as well. They did crush their 1st year expectations, and that won't be ignored.. but they CLEARLY have really lofty future goals. We just don't know how long they expect it to take.

And while I think the tech is really neat; i've long been a person who believed cloud gaming is not going to be what the tech giants think it will be. As it stands they've all fucked around, and in particular, Google found out.
 
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Xbox One with gamepass is so good, no one is upgrading at the moment.
Yeah dont think you can say it specifically declined over the holiday. I also disagree with the theres nothing on the horizon take.
 
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