Sometimes, the video games, they make money.
Microsoft's quarterly earnings for the first quarter of fiscal year 2022 are up, and they've got some modestly good news for the state of its video game-related financials.
For the 3-month period ending September 30 2021, Microsoft reported a 16 percent increase in "gaming revenue" from Q1 2020. If you dig through the results, you can find that was an increase of $501 million in gaming revenue.
The company also saw a boost in Xbox Hardware revenue, which grew 166 percent from the same quarter last year. (Of course, during this same quarter last year, the Xbox Series X|S had not been released yet).
Xbox content and services revenue was slower to grow however. That revenue stream only grew 2 percent over the same time period. Microsoft described this as a "strong prior year comparable, with growth in Xbox Game Pass subscriptions and first-party titles partially offset by declines from third-party titles."
"Strong prior year comparable" seems to be a nod to the global spike in video game revenue that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic's early months, and a decline in third-party titles might be tied to the number of large game releases that were delayed out of 2022 by multiple publishers.
We did learn recently that while Xbox Game Pass is pulling in more and more subscribers, the company did fall short of its target of 48 percent growth for the 12-month period ending June 30 2021. It had only managed to grow 37 percent in that time period.
Still, Microsoft's non-gaming efforts helped boost the company's Q1 revenue to $45.3 billion (it was $37.1 billion last year). Its profit for the quarter clocked in at $20.5 billion, a notable year-over-year increase from the $13.8 billion in profit it earned in Q1 2021.
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