At the end of October, Microsoft released the latest Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in Australia over its Game Pass subscription service.
The release of Black Ops 6 set new records for Xbox, and was the biggest launch of the franchise in its history. Black Ops 6 is the first Activision Blizzard title to launch on Microsoft’s Game Pass at the same time as its global release.
Following its A$104.21 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year, Microsoft is beginning to rake in significant gaming revenue.
Microsoft’s Q1 fiscal 2025 results for the three months ended September 30, 2024, show a 61 per cent increase in Xbox software revenues – although Xbox hardware revenue is declining.
The company doesn’t share precise numbers within its More Personal Computing segment, which includes Xbox, but noted that its gaming revenue as a whole increased 43 per cent year-on-year.
It noted “net impact from the Activision acquisition” on the revenue of its Xbox content and services branch up 61 per cent year-on-year.
Xbox hardware revenue though was down 29 per cent compared to the same period last year.
Microsoft CFO Amy Hood noted that results in Microsoft’s gaming segment were above its expectations for the quarter due to strong performance in “both first- and third-party content as well as consoles.”
In the earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella shared that Game Pass set a “new Q1 record for total revenue and average revenue per subscriber.”
“We set new records for monthly active users in the quarter, as more players than ever play our games across devices and on the Xbox platform,” said Nadella.
In Australia, a Game Pass Ultimate subscription costs A$22.95 a month, while Game Pass Console subscribers can use a cheaper A$10.95 monthly Game Pass Core subscription.
Microsoft hopes that the latest release will help it get one step closer to achieving its target of reaching 110 million Game Pass subscribers by 2030, more than triple the 34 million subscribers it had in February this year.
“One year since we closed our acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, we are focused on building a business positioned for long-term growth, driven by higher-margin content and services. You already see this transformation in our results, as we diversify the ways that gamers access our content,” added Nadella.
But with rival hardware such as PlayStation 5 Pro coming onto the market this quarter, Microsoft expects its gaming revenue to experience a decline in the “high single digits” for Q2 “due to hardware.”
There are now over half a billion Call of Duty copies sold overall. Black Ops 6 saw unit sales on PlayStation and Steam increase by 60 per cent year-over-year. “This speaks to our strategy of meeting gamers where they are by enabling them to play more games across the screens they spend their time on,” added Nadella.
