With Nintendo and Sony giving their quarterly reports, Microsoft is now following, and their financial year 2018-19 Q4 report paints a pretty interesting, if somewhat predictable, picture. While overall the hardware sales for the Xbox One family have slowed, subscription services have stepped up to make up some of the difference.
Xbox One sales have fallen 33% year-over-year from last year (we don’t know how many consoles were sold, since Microsoft stopped giving those numbers years ago). This late in the console generation, it’s not that surprising to see a drop in hardware sales, but Microsoft will be hoping that releasing an all-digital Xbox One S next month will offset some of that loss. Interestingly, though, game sales actually saw an increase of 5% in revenue, no doubt in part because Xbox Live’s monthly active users was up 7% YoY. It’s not entirely clear what impact Game Pass has on this, but both numbers probably have some degree of influence from that service.
While we know a decent chunk about the next PlayStation, the next Xbox is still mostly shrouded in secret, outside of reports that Microsoft is determined to have the most powerful console on the market. It’ll be interesting to see what Microsoft will do to try and reclaim some of the lost market. Perhaps we’ll find out at E3 in June.
The Xbox One S All-Digital Edition releases on May 7th, so there’s still some new current gen hardware to mull over before we dive into whatever the future holds for Xbox.
