During Microsoft’s quarterly financial conference call, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood talked about the performance of the Xbox business.

According to Nadella, Microsoft continues to pursue the expansive opportunities in gaming from the way games are created and distributed, to how they’re played and viewed. He mentioned that Microsoft had “one of the best quarter in gaming with strong revenue performance and record levels of engagement.”

The company is “continuing to attract, retain, and deepen user relationships across Xbox Live, Game Pass, and Mixer.” Sea of Thieves “drove gameplay” across Windows 10 and Xbox One in addition to 10 million hours of viewing on services like Mixer in its first week.

Nadella continued by mentioning that those results speak to the strength of the platform and services for both first-party and third-party experiences. He then promised that Microsoft will “continue to invest in the platform enhancing the cloud services with AI capabilities for developers to quickly build and monetize their games across PC, console, and mobile.”

Hood then explained that the quarterly results for the gaming business were “significantly better than expected.” Interestingly, she mentioned that this is partly due to a “third party title,” probably meaning PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, even if it wasn’t explicitly mentioned.

She also mentioned in passing that operating expenses for the whole segment increased 5% year-on-year partly due to investment in engineering for gaming.

Speaking of the outlook for the current quarter, Microsoft expects higher revenue growth rate than in the past quarter, as the gaming segment continues to benefit from third-party title performance and user engagement on Microsoft’s platforms.

Posted: Apr 27, 2018 10:45 am
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/microsoft-invest-xbox-cloud/