It's quarterly finance season for game makers as after Capcom's report yesterday we now have Xbox's turn to give us a peak behind the curtain.
Today Microsoft released the companies Q4 2024 financial report for all of its branches including Xbox and it was either good or bad depending on your perspective. Xbox Gaming revenue was up 44% compared to the same time frame last year while 48% of that growth was from the added revenue from Activision. This means that the rest of Xbox was down 4%.
Xbox's content and services was up even more however as it grew a whopping 61% with 58% of that growth coming from Activision. Overall it appears Microsoft was happy with these figures so that is a positive, though some will point to the 4% drop without Activision as cause for concern.
Hardware Fizzling
The one big negative in the Xbox numbers however was the hardware numbers. Xbox hardware dropped 42% year over year. While this trend of hardware sales dropping isn't just an Xbox problem, both PlayStation and Nintendo have seen significant drops, it is a rather high number.
With Xbox already talking about the next generation it is clear the Series S/X consoles are in the later half of its life cycle. How the fall lineup of games and the addition of the mid-gen refreshes help remains to be seen. It should also be noted that there were reports of Xbox consoles selling well thanks to the recent College Football 25 release so perhaps they will see an uptick next quarter.
Some Eye Popping Stats
During the presentation Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke on some of the stats from the gaming division that they thought were worth highlighting.
The one at first glance that is most eye opening is that they now boast 500 million monthly users in gaming. The vast majority of that number is likely from the recently purchased Candy Crush game, but it is still a massive number.
The other stat is that after the Fallout Amazon series debuted they saw engagement of the Fallout games through Game Pass spike 5x higher than before. It is clear that the show is a massive hit and helped the games tremendously. We will see how this plays into Xbox's plans moving forward and if we perhaps see even more tv series adaptations.
