Microsoft has released its latest earnings report, and included in the document is an update on how the Xbox division is doing. Overall, Xbox revenue is way up thanks to contributions from Activision Blizzard, but hardware sales are down massively. And that’s not exclusive to Xbox, either, as PlayStation recently missed sales targets and Switch sales are trending down.
Microsoft said in its quarterly filing that Xbox hardware revenue decreased 31%, due to “lower volume of consoles sold.” According to GI.biz, this past quarter was the worst ever since the Xbox Series X|S launched in November 2020 in terms of a quarterly percent decline.
Again, this downturn is not specific to Xbox. Circana, formerly known as NPD, reported recently that all three platforms–Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and Switch–are experiencing year-over-year declines in the US. All three platforms were down at a minimum of 19% year-over-year based on the latest publicly available data.
The crazy part too is how they bought up all these studios over the past couple years, and most of them still have yet to actually bring a product to market under Xbox.
Of all the Zenimax studios Microsoft acquired in 2020 (Bethesda, id, Arkane, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks, Zenimax Online), the list of Xbox titles they’ve published is:
In this time, Arkane also developed Deathloop as a PlayStation exclusive title.
I get that games take a long time to develop, but I feel like “Microsoft money” has not been a reliable indicator for either the quality or volume of their published games so far.