It probably goes without saying that subscription services are the future. Not just in gaming, in anything and everything. But it’s becoming more and more prominent in games with the likes of Xbox Game Pass, and of course, there’s the original service with Xbox Live. While overall revenue and hardware sales are down for Microsoft for Q3 of financial year 2019-20, those services are seeing healthy growth.
As revealed by the recent Microsoft fiscal conference call, both Game Pass and Xbox Live had a good quarter. Game Pass users have more than doubled year over year, though we still aren’t being provided actual numbers for the service. Xbox Live fared well, too, as Monthly Active Users (MAUs) set a new record in the last quarter which was between October 1st and December 31st.
Considering how important Game Pass is going to be going forward for Microsoft, numbers like these show it does seem to be as sustainable as Xbox Phil Spencer says. That combined with continued strong Xbox Live numbers shows that services over hardware could very well be a viable business strategy for the company going forward.