Microsoft has presented their financial results for the first quarter of the current fiscal year, ending this past September 30. The report shows an essentially flat revenue from their gaming business year-over-year, earning $1.89 billion, up 1%. The reason for this situation seems to be an admitted “lower hardware revenue” compensated by a 21% increase of software revenue.
At the sight of these results, the company is seeking to expand their approach to the gaming business, in the words of Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella: “We have high expectations for our gaming business to bring more people to more Microsoft experiences and broaden our engagement and usage scenarios. This means fundamentally rethinking how we measure progress in gaming. While we continue to innovate across the console, PC and live services, we see substantial additional opportunities across eSports and streaming. At 20% this quarter, our software and services revenue growth reflects the early-stage potential of this larger opportunity.”
One of the key points of this plan is the continued support of new services Game Pass and Mixer, programs that become less dependable of individual hardware platforms and promote connectivity among PC, consoles, and mobile, and the combined 53 million users of Xbox Live. But of course, the company will keep supporting their own hardware releases, like the upcoming Xbox One X, which has received a strong promotional effort focused on its 4K graphic features.
As for the overall results of the company, Microsoft earned $24.54 billion in revenue, up from $21.93 billion in the previous fiscal year. Net income increased from $5.67 billion to $6.58 billion.
- This article was updated on March 8th, 2018
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