The Xbox numbers are not good, but you have to put them in context. During the third quarter or Q3 that ended on March 31, revenue gaming They were down 4% from the same period a year earlier, a decline explained by the 30% year-over-year drop in hardware sales that Microsoft attributes to Xbox Series supply issues. For its part, revenue from Xbox content and services, which is undoubtedly the main driver of the division, increased by 3% compared to last year thanks to the growth of the Game Pass subscription service.
And the context? Xbox revenue amounted to $3.607 billion, the second best number for a third trimester. The record is held by the third quarter of last year (with which this is being compared), when Xbox raised $3.74 billion, a figure never before seen in this division in a period outside of the Christmas season.
The Xbox business is within the More Personal Computing division, which has not had a good quarter after posting a 9% drop in revenue compared to the same period last year. This result is largely explained by the poor performance of Windows OEM and Devices (Surface), whose year-over-year revenue is down 28% and 30%, respectively.
If Microsoft has ended up presenting positive results that have allowed it to shower shareholders with 9.7 billion dollars between share repurchases and dividends, it is due in large part to the Intelligent Cloud division, whose revenues have risen 16% to reach 22,100 millions of dollars. This increase is carried out by Azure, which together with the rest of the cloud services increases its year-on-year revenue by 27%. On the other hand, the Productivity and Business Processes division, which includes Office and LinkedIn, brings in $17.5 billion, an 11% year-over-year revenue increase.
