Microsoft says you don't need to buy an Xbox, so people don't have to

Microsoft showed a big increase in gaming revenue in its recent earnings call, which was of course lifted by its earnings The new acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

However, it seems that the “Xbox” in the “Xbox Games Section” has become less important over time. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said performance has been weaker than expected on console sales, and that expectations for next quarter will be a year-over-year decline, even as gaming revenues as a whole continue to rise.

Why is this happening? Unlike the underperforming Xbox One, there's nothing special mistake With the Xbox Series S or That players can use other devices to play on the cloud, or get Game Pass titles day one on their PC without a controller at all. In other words, Microsoft downplayed the need to buy an Xbox console and wanted to sell a lot of them, so… here it is.

Again, the ongoing message here is that even if these sales start to decline year over year and fall short of expectations, Microsoft is still touting that its gaming arm is growing. Xbox Game Pass itself is leading this, although we haven't gotten updated subscription numbers for a couple of years now. And of course, now that Activision Blizzard has joined forces with Microsoft, they have King, a mobile money printing machine, annual Call of Duty team sales and microtransactions, and Blizzard bits and pieces like Overwatch 2 and Diablo cosmetics, as well as WoW subscriptions. But they paid $69 billion for all of it.

Sony is, of course, expected to significantly outsell the Xbox Series S and But Sony has its own problems, as it may have a lot of console sales, but it conflicts with Microsoft's hardware, the PlayStation He is The only place you can play new PlayStation games. They're trying to change that with faster PC releases and things like current and future Bungie multiplayer games becoming cross-platform. But they say they can't commit to the full Game Pass model for big releases like Xbox.

So, there are issues on both sides, and it is still unclear which vision of the future will prevail. He may end up somewhere in the middle.

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