Indiana Jones hits 4 million players, but Xbox revenue and hardware sales fall

thesixthaxis.com:

Microsoft’s Q2 earnings call has provided a number of highlights for the Xbox gaming division, including strong game and Xbox Game Pass performance, but the most important statistic is that the company saw a 7% revenue decline, year-on-year, in large part because of a huge 29% drop in Xbox hardware revenue through the final few months of 2024.

Let’s start with the good news. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has brought in over 4 million players across Xbox Series X|S, PC and through Xbox Game Pass subscribers. We never get actual sales figures for Microsoft games anymore, but this is an encouraging amount of reach, and we’ll certainly see a big bump when the game arrives on PlayStation 5 in the first half of this year.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also touted Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 as having a record breaking launch quarter, as it topped sales charts for both Xbox and PlayStation, showing the value in multi-platform releases for Microsoft going forward.

Both of these launches fuelled a 30% growth in Game Pass subscribers on PC, which also indicates the potential of this subscription service, after a few years of slower growth than Microsoft had wanted. This helped Game Pass set a new quarterly revenue record, with the overall Xbox content and services revenue growing 2%.

However, in the quarter ending on 31st December 2024, the gaming division made $6.6 billion in revenue, which was a drop of $530 million year-over-year. That’s quite significant and revealing, as 2023’s figures had the massive bump of acquiring Activision Blizzard in October 2023, flooding the financial report with all the sales of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Diablo revenue. That helped to mask whatever else was going on with Microsoft’s gaming business through 2024’s quarterly reports, but we’re now seeing a meaningful comparison once again.

It’s really looking like Xbox’s decline as a console manufacturer is now irreversible, and little in Microsoft’s new multiplatform release