<\/p>\n
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella rarely says much about Xbox on the quarterly earnings calls he oversees for the company. Investors almost never ask questions about Xbox. It\u2019s almost a footnote in these discussions, which are becoming increasingly focused on successes in artificial intelligence, a thing that makes Microsoft loads of money.<\/p>\n
When he does talk about Xbox, Nadella is almost always positive. There\u2019s usually a little segment, a sentence or two, maybe touting a major new release or a Game Pass number milestone, where he reminds everyone that it exists and is doing well in some metric or another. Which is why his tone on today\u2019s earnings call during the blink-and-you-miss-it Xbox mention was rather surprising.<\/p>\n
Nadella\u2019s statement today was vague and hopeful, but about as down as I\u2019ve ever heard him be about gaming. He indirectly referenced the recent devastation: lay-offs impacting 1600, expectation to lay off 1600 more, and separation from four (maybe five) of its owned studios. Nadella referred to this as \u201cnecessary decisions\u2026to reset the business for long-term growth,\u201d which is essentially the same as what Asha Sharma has been saying.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes to Xbox, we are making the necessary decisions required across our content portfolio, platform, and operations to reset the business for long-term growth,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have the best IP in the industry and talented studios around the world, and believe we can bring these strengths together, and expect to return the business to growth in fiscal 2027.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was Nadella\u2019s statement in full, with no specifics offered on what \u201creturn to growth\u201d means. The one metric that\u2019s been shared with us, that the division is operating at a 3% profit-margin, suggests profitability, but profitability is not the same as growth and evidence suggests Xbox has been on the decline for a while now.<\/p>\n
Contrast this with what Nadella said of Xbox last year in a surprisingly lengthy statement for him on the division that touted multiple successes and did not indicate that anything was wrong at all:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes to gaming, we have 500 million monthly active users across platforms and devices. And we are now the top publisher on both Xbox and PlayStation this quarter, with the successful launches of Forza Horizon 5<\/em> and Oblivion Remastered<\/em>. The Call of Duty<\/em> franchise has never been stronger: 50 million people have played Black Ops 6<\/em>. Total hours surpassed 2 billion. Minecraft<\/em> saw record monthly active usage and revenue this quarter, thanks in large part to the success of the Minecraft<\/em> movie. And we have nearly 40 games in development, so much, much more to come. We surpassed over 500 million hours of game play streamed via the cloud this year. And Game Pass annual revenue was nearly $5 billion for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n Microsoft overall reported \u201ca record fiscal year\u201d with revenue surpassing $331 billion, but also underwent major cuts company-wide this month anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella rarely says much about Xbox on the quarterly earnings calls he oversees for the company. Investors almost never ask questions about Xbox. It\u2019s almost a footnote in these discussions, which are becoming increasingly focused on successes in artificial intelligence, a thing that makes Microsoft loads of money. When he does talk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[2869,4116,5276,9632,315,698],"class_list":{"0":"post-10671","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news","8":"tag-ceo","9":"tag-heres","10":"tag-microsofts","11":"tag-spoke","12":"tag-xbox","13":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}