Xbox Software and Services Revenue Grows by 12% While Hardware Revenue Declines

Today Microsoft announced its financial results for the third quarter of the fiscal year 2019, related to the period between January 1 and March 31.

First of all, we get a new look at the performance of the More Personal Computing business, which includes the gaming division.

Xbox Live monthly active users were at 63 million, up from 59 million year-on-year. They dropped by one million since the previous quarter, but since that was the Holiday season, it’s actually impressive that the decline was small.

Gaming revenue was $2.363 billion. It grew by 5% year-on-year thanks to software and service growth offsetting lower hardware revenue.

In particular, Xbox software and services grew by 12% driven by monetization of third-party games and growth in subscriptions.

We also take a look at the performance of Microsoft as a whole. As you can see below, all the relevant figures are in the black.

The “More Personal Computing” segment, which includes gaming, is actually the highest contributor for the quarter, narrowly beating Productivity and Intelligent cloud, even if it registered the slowest growth.

Recently we heard a few interesting details about Microsoft’s E3 plans from Xbox Division head Phil Spencer himself.

If you want to compare, you can check out the results from the previous quarter, keeping in mind that it included the Holiday season, so it’s not exactly apples to apples.