Xbox Revenue Grew 5% in First 3 Months of 2025, Hardware Revenue Drops 6% - Sales
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 May 2025 / 14,316 Views
Microsoft has released its earnings report for the second quarter of the 2025 fiscal year, which ended up March 31, 2025.
Xbox gaming revenue increased by five percent year-on-year to $5.72 billion. This is slightly better than the forecast, which expected growth in the low single digits percent.
Xbox content & services revenue increased eight percent compared to the same quarter a year ago, driven by growth in Xbox Game Pass, Call of Duty, and Minecraft. This is slightly better than the forecast, which expected growth in the low to mid single digits percent.
Xbox hardware revenue dropped six percent year-on-year. This is inline with expectations, which was to see a decline year-on-year.
Overall, Microsoft reported for the quarter revenue was up 13 percent year-over-year to $70.1 billion, operating income increased 16 percent to $32.0 billion, and net income was up 18 percent to $25.8 billion.
"We continue to transform the business and focus on margin expansion as we bring our games to over 500 million monthly active users across devices," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "We ended the quarter as the top publisher by pre-orders and pre-installs on both Xbox and PlayStation store.
"PC Game Pass revenue increased over 45 percent year-over-year. With Xbox Play Anywhere players can now access more than 1,000 games they can play across console and PC. And just last week we brough cloud gaming to LGTVs. Cloud gaming set a new record surpassing 150 million hours played for the first time this quarter.
"We are also integrating AI across the Xbox. New Copilot for gaming is a personalized gaming companion that provides in game assistance and expert coaching. And our first of its kind model can generate gameplay in real time.
"Finally, it is fantastic to see the success of the Minecraft movie, which is the top grossing film of the year. In addition to monetizing our IP in new ways, we are seeing a 75 percent plus increase in weekly active users of the game year-over-year since the release."
Microsoft's forecast for the quarter ending June 30, 2025 expects total Xbox revenue to grow in the mid single digits percent year-on-year. Xbox content & services is expected to grow in the high single digits percent driven by first-party content. No forecast was given for Xbox hardware.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Bluesky.
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Article updated with details from Microsoft's earnings call.
Seems 600k~700k X/S console units for this quarter.
Good results I guess.
(Edit:
After having looked a bit deeper into it, I think that, despite +5% being growth no matter what, imho this just can't be a good result for them operatively in comparison to last year's Q3. I pretty much even say it's underwhelming, to say at least. I'll maybe expand my opinion as to why I think that later.)
One question though:
Xbox hardware was down 47% in Jan., 21% in Feb. and 27% in March year-on-year.
How does that translate to hardware (edit: hardware revenue) being down "only" 6% year-on-year for the Q3?
The 6% drop for hardware is revenue and not unit sales. The average selling price per console is likely higher due to the Series X being a higher % of sales. Our Q1 2024 estimates also had an extra week compared to Q1 2025. If you subtract the extra week for 2024 the drop isn't as extreme. However, I plan on going through the numbers and will likely adjust it up, so it is down less than it is now.
Series X is accounting for higher portion of sales? I wonder why that is?
Yeah, sounds plausible, or rather there's a high chance it could only be explained by the Series X being sold significantly more in percentage than last Q3.
While units sold across X|S still decreased anyhow.
Revenue does not include the costs of making the product just the dollar amount of sales.
The cost of parts may very well be coming down. Just a guess. If MS keeps XB hardware at the same price on shelves, that would mean higher profits per unit sold due to the savings up front on parts. So even if XB unit sales are declining by a fair amount, MS may only be losing a small amount of money at the end of the day.
"We are also integrating AI across the Xbox."
No thanks.
