Microsoft posted another strong quarter in its latest earnings call, with revenue coming in at $49.4 billion, an 18% increase over the same period last year. That’s about as good as it gets.
While there were some big gains across the board, the Xbox unit registered a more normal 4% increase.
CEO Satya Nadella highlighted this in the earnings call by announcing that more than 10 million people have streamed games via Xbox Cloud Gaming. This impressive figure shows the potential of this service at this early stage.
That said, there is a distinct lack of context here, which is important.
This is because there is no mention of how many of those 10 million people are currently subscribed to the $14.99/month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate plan that is only tier that offers support for cloud streaming of games to supported devices.
Speaking of, there is a clear definition of what constitutes a stream. Theoretically, someone could sign up for the service for one month at $1 and stream a title for five minutes and then decide that game streaming is not for them due to quality or bandwidth constraints or what have you.
There is not telling whether cancelations have been accounted for in these figures.
We also don’t have an updated figure for Xbox and PC Game Pass subscribers yet; the last official piece of intelligence we got from Microsoft was 25 million.
Overall, though, the Xbox division has been doing well lately, as even a 4% increase is a net positive. Xbox hardware enjoyed its strongest March sales in over a decade, and hardware revenue was up 14% overall.
Gaming revenue soared to $3.74 billion, a 6% increase.
Redmond expects the next quarter to be more difficult for gaming, with chances that Xbox revenue could decline due to hardware production and supply difficulties. Hopefully, this, too, will be a minor hiccup for a business side of Microsoft that is finally on the up.
