Today Microsoft announced its financial results for Q4 of fiscal year 2024, related to the period between April and June 2024, including an update on its gaming business.
It’s worth mentioning that (like for the past two quarters), the results presented today include the numbers for Activision, Blizzard, and King as Microsoft completed the embattled $75.4 billion acquisition of the publisher last year.
According to the financial documents of the More Personal Computing Business, which includes the gaming segment of the company, Gaming revenue grew 44% year-on-year. 48% of that growth came from the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Xbox Content and Services revenue grew 61% year-on-year, slightly ahead of expectations. 58% of that growth was due to the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Stronger-than-expected performance of first-party content was partly offset by third-party content.
On the other hand, Xbox Hardware revenue dropped by 42%. Obviously, hardware revenue wasn’t directly influenced by the acquisition.
Below you can find the slide showing the specific net impact from the acquisition on Microsoft’s results. Specifically, Activision Blizzard brought in $1.69 billion in revenue, but still resulted in in an operating loss of $570 million due to $900 million in cost of revenue and $1.35 billion in operating expenses.
The Form 10-K submitted by Microsoft also provides the results for the full fiscal year (from July 2023 to June 2024).
Gaming revenue grew $6.0 billion (+39%) year-on-year driven by growth in Xbox content and services.
Xbox Content and Services revenue grew 50% year-on-year. 44% of that comes from the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Xbox hardware revenue dropped by 13% due to the lower volume of consoles sold.
We also get the results for Microsoft as a whole. Quarterly revenue was $64.7 billion, up 15% year-on-year. Operating income was $27.9 billion, also up 15% year-on-year.
It’s worth mentioning that Microsoft follows a different fiscal calendar from the April-March calendar used by most companies. Its fiscal year goes from July to June, so the period between April and June 2024 is classified as Q4.
You can also enjoy more insight into Microsoft’s gaming business in our article about the comments from CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood made during the following conference call.
If you’d like to read more news on gaming industry financial results, we recently saw the announcement of the quarterly figures for Capcom and Koei Tecmo.
Speaking of Activision Blizzard, a few days ago, we heard that the World of Warcraft development team formed a wall-to-wall union involving all departments.
