The Xbox One is in a curious place right now within the gaming world. On one hand, compared to the PS4 and the Nintendo Switch, they aren’t doing their best sales-wise. They are selling, don’t get me wrong, but they aren’t doing what they could be, and a big reason for this is their lack of exclusives. However, at E3 2018, they not only revealed a large library of titles coming to them (most are multiplatform for the record), but, they also revealed that they’ve bought many more studios to help build up their 1st party presence.
During a financial call, two of the heads of the Xbox Division, including Phil Spencer, talked about how important it was to Microsoft and to them to not only be building up their gaming brand, but to push the boundaries of what gaming is. Even more interesting, they noted that the gaming division made $10 billion dollars in revenue this past year.
“In gaming, we’re pursuing our expansive opportunity from the way games are created and distributed, to how they’re played and viewed, surpassing ten billion revenue this year for the first time. We’re investing aggressively in content, community, and cloud services across every end-point to expand usage and deepen engagement with gamers.
The combination of Xbox Live Game Pass subscription and Mixer are driving record levels of growth and engagement.”
While they didn’t break down where exactly all of their profit came from within the gaming division, it’s fair to say that Xbox Live and the Game Pass played a huge role in it. Not the least of which is because they haven’t had many big 1st party releases this year. But, one that did help no doubt was Sea of Thieves.
It’ll be interesting to see how Xbox One goes from here on out, for it has a lot of potential within the next year, but will it capitalize on it?
