At this point, I'm getting a little tired of running victory laps—my knees aren't what they used to be—but PC Gaming tallied up another mark on the scoreboard. We're coming up on our five year anniversary of cheekily declaring we'd won the console war, and it turns out yeah. We were sort of right. Consoles aren't exactly doing great, right now.
Microsoft has once more proved our writers' powers of prophecy by revealing that Xbox hardware revenue has actively been weighing the whole operation down, despite gaming revenue doing very well. That's as per a financial earnings release (thanks, Eurogamer)—more specifically, a slide on this presentation that details the following:
- Gaming revenue up 5% (up 6% CC)
- Xbox content and services revenue grew 8% (up to 98% CC) driven by growth in Xbox Game Pass, Call of Duty, and Minecraft
- Xbox hardware revenue declined 6% (down 5% CC)
This isn't necessarily anything new, though. As part of our own Tyler Wilde's concerned check-in on our console cousins almost a year ago, he pointed out that Microsoft had indeed reported a staggering 30% decline in Xbox hardware revenue between early 2024 and early 2023.
Now, part of this whole decline has been due to Microsoft shedding its console-exclusivity chains and going system-agnostic, as well as acquiring game studios to fly under its banner. Blizzard, Bethesda, Obsidian—the list goes on. It's also shut down a fair few, too, in its hunger for growth. With that $69 billion acquisition of Blizzard preluding a huge sweep of layoffs.
It's also because there's just no real reason to spring for an Xbox at the moment. There are no real major console exclusives, and Game Pass, which has been a banger on PC lately—Indiana Jones & the Great Circle, South of Midnight, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Avowed are all excellent games worthy of your time—is similarly system-agnostic.
That's not to criticise Microsoft for those choices, which are objectively pretty consumer-friendly (and there are other, more important issues to level at the computing giant right now) but merely a statement of fact: Console exclusivity is more and more becoming a thing of the past. Unless you happen to be Nintendo, in which case, you'll be holding onto your console exclusives to the very end. Also, you're probably busy suing somebody.
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