Microsoft posted its fourth quarter earnings for the 2024 financial year – and while its cloud services are making a lot of money, Xbox sales have been waning.
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As reported by The Verge, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud revenues were up 19 per cent year over year, and now make up 45 per cent of all the company’s revenue. Unfortunately, Xbox hardware revenue is down 42 per cent this quarter.
However, Xbox content and services revenue is actually up 61 per cent, showing people are buying and playing the games and using Game Pass – they just aren’t buying the consoles.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, as Xbox has been pushing the line of “no Xbox required” to steer more people toward its cloud gaming services. You can play Xbox games on your Amazon Fire TV stick, laptop, and smartphone as long as you’re subscribed to the right Game Pass tier.
Xbox recently announced it was increasing the price of its Game Pass subscription tiers as well as introducing a new tier that many are unhappy with. Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass are both increasing by £2 per month, and a new Standard tier. This is cheaper but it won’t include Xbox’s cloud gaming capabilities or day one access to first-party Xbox games, arguably the two best reasons to have Game Pass.
This price hike comes after Microsoft stated it would not be raising the cost of the subscription service because of its acquisition of Call Of Duty developer Activision Blizzard King. However, Call Of Duty games will be coming to Game Pass on the first day they’re out, including Black Ops 6, due to launch later this year.
In other news, there will reportedly be no more Mario & Sonic Olympics games because of NFTs.
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