All purpose Sales and Sales Rumours and Anecdotes [2024 edition]
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
- Start date
April 3, 2024
wccftech.com
PC Top 2023 Games a Decade Old on Average; PC Drove Growth in 2023, Console Will 2024 Onward
A snapshot of the PC and console gaming market in 2023 shows an industry battling against its own past successes.
wccftech.com
Activision Blizzard boosts Microsoft earnings, but Xbox console sales plummet
Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has contributed to a boost in gaming revenue, but Xbox console sales hav…
www.eurogamer.net
Series is therefore tracking well below Xbox One?
Activision Blizzard boosts Microsoft earnings, but Xbox console sales plummet
Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has contributed to a boost in gaming revenue, but Xbox console sales hav…
Series is therefore tracking well below Xbox One?
Yes this is below Xbox One.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Not much of a surprise really.
They really need to drop prices. I expect the S to drop at the june show case and maybe the x also.
Really? I thought it'd at least maintain current momentum. Sales curve has peaked much earlier than other consoles, and reflects really badly that instead of growing their platform generation over generation, MS are in a taildive. Beginning of this gen we were looking at Series doing better than One and One being a bad gen, a bunch of painful mistakes that MS were recovering from. So this gen should be better than last, selling lockstep 2:1 behind PS5, but it's fumbling hard. And at this point, it'd take something extraordinary to turn that around and get significant growth again.
I don't think anyone was expecting this three years ago, so I'm not sure why this isn't surprising. Were you expecting MS's hardware sales to keep dropping?
Putting Microsoft’s cratering Xbox console sales in context
Why declining quarterly numbers might not be awful news for Microsoft's gaming business.
arstechnica.com
So hardware sales down, overall gaming revenues down but Gamepass and Activision games revenues prevent overall games revenues from dropping as much as they otherwise would have.
Good thing MSFT is riding the AI hype.
The Activision income is a silly metric. I mean, of course it was going to increase MS's revenue by the addition of AB's revenue. Buying more revenue has a tendency to do that. You can keep buying more and more companies to get more and more revenue...until you go bust. The impact of AB should be ignored for comparisons with previous years, and then factored in in subsequent years for how MS are managing to monetise that acquisition, though I appreciate investors have their own brand of logic.
Gamepass remains a mystery - MS's declined to share sub numbers this time around. Is there a clearly figure? MS's summary says, "Xbox content and services revenue increased 3% driven by growth in Xbox Game Pass." Three percent could be a few hot items rather than platform growth.
Also, Ars used all the wrong colours for their graph!
That doesn’t make any sense. Revenue is revenue, from a business perspective they bought a user base and growth and revenue with it. Earlier people were talking about “pay back” in the ABK acquisition threads saying it would never be worth it. Now that they own it we should disregard its value?The Activision income is a silly metric. I mean, of course it was going to increase MS's revenue by the addition of AB's revenue. Buying more revenue has a tendency to do that. You can keep buying more and more companies to get more and more revenue...until you go bust. The impact of AB should be ignored for comparisons with previous years, and then factored in in subsequent years for how MS are managing to monetise that acquisition, though I appreciate investors have their own brand of logic.
Gamepass remains a mystery - MS's declined to share sub numbers this time around. Is there a clearly figure? MS's summary says, "Xbox content and services revenue increased 3% driven by growth in Xbox Game Pass." Three percent could be a few hot items rather than platform growth.
Also, Ars used all the wrong colours for their graph!
Can’t have it both ways. 68B was paid to grow their revenue to where it is now.
This is the difference between business and platform strategies versus gamers just buying video games In a standard model. The traditional model is dead and everyone knows it. MS is free to change the model they see fit to grow their business. We can’t just discount it.
Putting Microsoft’s cratering Xbox console sales in context
Why declining quarterly numbers might not be awful news for Microsoft's gaming business.
So hardware sales down, overall gaming revenues down but Gamepass and Activision games revenues prevent overall games revenues from dropping as much as they otherwise would have.
Good thing MSFT is riding the AI hype.
For the first time they did not talk about Gamepass growth, it was probably down too. Like the playstation plus it reached a ceiling.
It is what it is and I acknowledged that, but it's still silly. You can conceptually keep increasing revenue by getting more and more into debt buying companies, until your revenue growth is 500% and your debt is Chapter 11. Obviously in the case MS had the cash lying around, but the revenue growth here is not the same as, say, Nintendo's 10% revenue growth for 2023 which was achieved leveraging their existing assets. And it's not the same as all the other MS revenue reports where acquisition of a studio hasn't brought with it ongoing revenues from GaaS.
I get it's finance and how these things are done, but that figure of 50% growth is kinda meaningless in terms of understanding the Xbox business. It just shows MS bought in more revenue; for all we know the other XB divisions have shrunk 50% and this overall growth is just from a huge uptick. We won't be able to make sense of the performance of the whole division under its new structure until next year to compare to this year.
Edit: I'll try to illustrate this a bit better. If Sony reports 12% revenue growth YoY, we know that's because they've sold 12% more hardware and/or games. If Nintendo reports the same, we know it's from the same. In this case, the revenue growth does not come from selling more hardware or software, but folding in the existing revenue from ABK. And we don't know what that revenue is in comparison to how ABK did last year. So potentially, you could have MS Gaming down 10%, and ABK down 10%, but rolled into one figure it comes out at 50% up for MS gaming. We don't know what's actually growing or not. We're left clueless (unless there are more details in the financials that these articles haven't touched upon, but I don't expect MS to break down the numbers to something we can follow because they don't).
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
It's not surprising. We know what was going in Europe last Christmas. Either price drops and new amazing content turn sales around or this generation is going to be shorter than MS wanted, but they'll survive.
Last time they only sold 25 million units they had about 4 studios. Now they have 32. They'll be fine.
I guess that doesn’t register for me. They are all under 1 banner now, they all operate under Xbox management.
It’s like a football team that’s struggling, suddenly makes some trades (expensive ones) and suddenly the team is doing better than before. We don’t need to figure or separate the players we traded for to understand how the rest of the team is doing performing. In doing so you defeat the purpose of trading for these players. We trade for players to make the team win, And we need the team to get them better integrated for further success.
We should be looking at the number as a whole now, separation isn’t necessary.
I guess that doesn’t register for me. They are all under 1 banner now, they all operate under Xbox management.
It’s like a football team that’s struggling, suddenly makes some trades (expensive ones) and suddenly the team is doing better than before. We don’t need to figure or separate the players we traded for to understand how the rest of the team is doing performing. In doing so you defeat the purpose of trading for these players. We trade for players to make the team win, And we need the team to get them better integrated for further
We should be looking at the number as a whole now, separation isn’t necessary. Nothing is ever entirely in isolation. As soon as they owned ABK, the effects of that merger had direct and indirect effects on the whole business; it has had effects on the whole industry.
I disagree. I bet while the team is now doing better, the coach is tracking individual players and seeing those who are doing worse with a view to replacing them. Likewise, analysis of the players after the transfer will compare their performance with the new team versus the old. Sure, the new team is doing better, but this player is not managing the plays he used to.
Is ABK performing better or worse than it was last year? Is XB performing better or worse overall? And how much so?
I won't say this is the only perspective, but it strikes me as a necessary component to understand how the business is operating this year versus last. The sports analogy doesn't quite work here. It'd be more like buying players and those players coming with league points. We were 7 points, bottom of the table. We bought four expensive players who each came with 4 points. Now we have 19 points, mid table. Look how great the team is doing! Only, perhaps it still can't play for toffee and these players are going to worse and worse at this club?
That whole team performance you want to look at, what matters in the long run, can't be compared or understood until the whole team has been together for a year to compare performance this year versus last. When we look at the gaming division's revenue next year, we'll get an idea of that. But this 50% figure tells us very little.
Activision Blizzard is down 17% compared to last year but this is not Microsoft fault...
Each quarter you’re required to generate revenue, so you’re not buying banked league points. You’re still earning it for that quarter. That being said if you agree that 2025s numbers should be compared to 2024s numbers to understand what’s happening holistically then think it’s rather unfair to do.
We would then discount all growth during covid because that will never happen again, even Sony had to adjust their units down.
Continuing, we as well would ignore the current Fallout sales blip, because that was driven by investment into a TV show.
what if the same 68B dollars was driven into marketing, TV shows, and building titles, and they moved up to 50% more revenue? Should we discount it because they spent 68B to drive it?
We know that more spending correlates to more growth. But If the answer is no, then we’re only having a debate of how that 68B was spent. One method is clearly more risk free and sustainable profits generated, over another which could be a one time blip and everything falling back to normal values following.
Any shareholder would want the purchase; it generates guaranteed revenue likely for decades to come. Going on an expansion and marketing blitz doesn’t.
If did spend 68B to expand and market, the headlines would have been the same. Xbox revenue up 50 points is deceptive, because they spent 68B to do so. Now they are in the hole so bad, it’s impossible to sustain spending like this to generate revenue. Xbox is done!
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