The first quarter of the fiscal year for Microsoft ended recently (September 30) and they have released their financial earnings for the time period. The upkeep for this period has been extremely short, being $1.89 billion in earnings (a meagre 1% increase from last year). Microsoft reports that this flat revenue from their gaming business is because of lower hardware sales (which makes sense since everybody is waiting for the Xbox One X to drop) and the 21% increase in software revenue covered those stats up.
In light of these statistics, Microsoft have stated that they are reshaping and reevaluating what their Gaming business actually is, they’re going to do this by expanding and broadening their focus through their gaming sector.
“We have high expectations for our gaming business to bring more people to more Microsoft experiences and broaden our engagement and usage scenarios. This means fundamentally rethinking how we measure progress in gaming. While we continue to innovate across the console, PC and live services, we see substantial additional opportunities across eSports and streaming. At 20% this quarter, our software and services revenue growth reflects the early-stage potential of this larger opportunity.”, this is what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had to say about the change.
The most vital aspect of these changes is the continued support for non-hardware dependent service such as Game Pass and Mixer, which encourage the Microsoft “Play Anywhere” formula for connected devices such as PC, Xbox and Mobile. Xbox Live holds an audience of 53 million strong and entertaining every hardware in their ecosystem is going to be beneficial for them. It’s not to say that Microsoft will completely drop their hardware focus as the Xbox One X is still going to be supported strongly for it’s 4k capabilities.
The overall net income for Microsoft for this year is $24.54 billion (increased from $21.93 billion from last year). Stay tuned for more!
