Xbox FY24 Q4 gaming revenue up 44% year-over-year, mostly thanks to the Activision Blizzard acquisition
Microsoft gaming revenue continues to see massive year-over-year boosts thanks to the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King.
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What you need to know
The largest gaming acquisition in history continues to shape the picture of Microsoft’s financial results.
Microsoftsharedits financial results for FY24 Q4 on Tuesday, outlining details across the company’s divisions and revealing that gaming revenue was up 44% year-over-year. Like inFY24 Q3andFY24 Q2, this boost is primarily driven by the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, which Microsoft completed in October 2023.
Xbox content and services revenue is up 61%, mostly (but not entirely) driven by the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. Meanwhile, Xbox hardware revenue is down 42% year-over-year. Overall, Microsoft saw$64.7 billion in revenue for the quarter.
Speaking on the accompanying earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted that Xbox games have over 500 million monthly active users, while praising theFallout TV serieson Prime Video, pointing to it as an example of using a different medium to expand a gaming franchise’s audience, as hours played for Fallout games onXbox Game Passincreased 5x after the show’s launch.
How has Activision Blizzard King changed Xbox revenue?
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Ever sinceMicrosoft finalized its acquisition of Activision Blizzard Kingon Oct. 13, 2023, it changed the following year of financial results. This move brought previously third-party revenue for games likeCall of DutyandDiablo 4in-house, altering how things were accounted for. As a result, we’re seeing a one-time gargantuan boost to the year-over-year numbers that Microsoft reports, as these quarters are being directly compared to a prior quarter thatdidn’thave those games as first-party titles.
Integration of Activision Blizzard King into the rest of Xbox has progressed throughout 2024, with the publishers taking part in Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase for the year and revealing thatCall of Duty: Black Ops 6would be available day one on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate when it launches on Oct. 25, 2024.
Microsoft has begun to place games from the Activision Blizzard King catalog in Xbox Game Pass, with Diablo 4 being added back in April and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) being added to the service recently, while reports indicate theCrash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is also coming soon.
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Looking ahead, Microsoft maintains a strong lineup of upcoming games such asAvowed, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and more from across Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks, which currently do not have exact release dates but are slated to arrive at some point in 2024.
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Samuel Tolbert is a freelance writer covering gaming news, previews, reviews, interviews and different aspects of the gaming industry, specifically focusing on Xbox and PC gaming on Windows Central. You can find him on Twitter@SamuelTolbert.
