During the quarterly financial conference call, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood provided insight into the company’s gaming business.
At the beginning of the livestreamed presentation, Nadella boasted 500 million monthly active users across platforms and devices.
We have now over 500 million monthly active users across platforms and devices and our content pipeline has never been stronger. We previewed our record 30 new titles at our showcase this quarter. 18 of them such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be available on Game Pass.
Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can now stream directly on devices they already have including as of last month Amazon Fire TVs.
Nadella also mentioned that hours played on Game Pass for Fallout games grew 500% quarter-over-quarter due to the debut of the TV series on Amazon Prime Video.
Finally, we’re bringing our IPs to new audiences. Fallout, for example, made its debut as a TV show on Amazon Prime this quarter. It was the second most-watched title on the platform ever and hours played on Game Pass for the Fallout franchise increased nearly 5X quarter-over-quarter.
Hood mentioned the prediction for the financial performance of the gaming business in the current quarter (between July and September 2024).
Microsoft expects revenue to grow in the mid-thirties year-on-year, including approximately 40 points of net impact from the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Xbox Content and Services revenue is expected to grow in the low-to-mid fifties driven by the net impact of the acquisition. Hardware revenue is expected to decline again year-on-year.
Responding to a question at the end of the Q&A session, Nadella explained that Microsoft’s recent investments in gaming were about having the right portfolio of “what we love about gaming and always have loved about gaming which is Xbox and the content for the console” and expanding from there to content for everywhere people play games, starting with PC and mobile.
He added that the Activision Blizzard acquisition came with considerable content to cover PC gaming on top of mobile gaming, which Microsoft never had. Now Microsoft has both the content and the ability to access all the traditional high-scale platforms where people play games (consoles, PC, and mobile) on top of the “new sockets” like Amazon Fire TV.
According to Nadella, this is the type of access that will help Microsoft reach new gamers or existing gamers everywhere they want to play. This will ultimately show as “software plus services and transaction revenue” which is seen as the company’s long-term key performance indicator.
Hood then added that the progress made, including with Game Pass is “very encouraging.”
If you’d like to read more about Microsoft’s quarterly financial results, you can check out our dedicated article from earlier today.
