Phil Spencer and the Xbox Division teams can have a smile. Indeed, the latest quarterly results (January-March) communicated by Microsoft show that the video game is doing well on the side of Redmond. Revenue increased 6% from 2021 to $3.74 billion. Analyst Daniel Ahmad (Niko Partners) explains that this is quite simply the best quarter in the history of the Xbox brand outside of the holiday season. After being dominated by a long intractable PS5, the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S are getting back on their feet. Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, even drives the point home: over the last two quarters, they have sold better than the PS5 in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Western Europe. We would have liked him to accompany his remarks with sales figures, an exercise to which the Redmond firm has not complied for a while.
If the PS5 and the Xbox Series each have to deal with the shortage of electronic components, Microsoft seems to be doing much better than its competitor. Why ? According to Nick “Shpeshal Nick” Baker (XboxEra), the American manufacturer would have released the checkbook so that the factories produce the chips of the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S as a priority, thus grilling the politeness to Sony Interactive Entertainment. In addition, we must not forget that the manufacture of the Xbox Series S is less complex than that of its big sister, and therefore requires fewer resources. In any case, the services are still popular on Xbox: the Xbox Game Pass (which has some 25 million subscribers) represents more than 80% of turnover (+ 4% compared to 2021), while hardware capped at 20%. There is also the Xbox Cloud Gaming which totals ten million users. In short, Microsoft can be serene.
