Xbox games revenue up thanks to Activision, but consoles sales decline

Microsoft has announced its third quarter earnings for the period ending March 31, 2024, noting a 62% revenue increase in Xbox content and services.

As part of the More Personal Computing sector, Microsoft said the increase was driven by 61 points of net impact from the Activision acquisition. Thanks to the latter, revenue for the sector was up 17% to $15.6 billion year-over-year (yoy). However, taking Activision Blizzard King out of the equation, revenue for Xbox content and services was only up by 1%.

Gaming revenue was up 51% yoy to $5.45 billion, but once again, 55 points were from Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, otherwise, the sector would have reported a decline of 4% yoy.

As for hardware, with fewer units sold during the quarter, Xbox console sales declined by 31% yoy.

During the investors call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the firm set third quarter records for game streaming hours, console usage, and monthly active devices. According to Nadella, Game Pass users played over 10 million hours of Diablo 4 within the first ten days, making it one of the company’s biggest first party Game Pass launches ever since its March 28 addition to the service.

The ongoing success of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was also highlighted, reiterated Microsoft release four of its fan-favorite titles on PlayStation and Switch, and noted that earlier this month, the company had seven games on the PlayStation Store’s top 25 downloads list – more than any other publisher.

The company also highlighted its product releases for the quarter such as the Minecraft and BBC Earth DLC, Palworld hitting game preview, Season 11 for Sea of Thieves, the launch of Operation: Spirit of Fire in Halo Infinite, the Dune Expansion for Microsoft Flight Simulator, the release of Obsidian’s critically acclaimed Pentiment, and several new accessories.

As a whole, for the quarter the company reported a 17% increase in revenue to $61.9 billion.