Microsoft’s status as a leading publisher is assured, but weak new financials cast doubt on its strategic transition and way forward.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Spiders: "We're going to cut straight to the chase so you're not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated.
What does it mean? This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We'll cease our functions immediately. The planned DLC will release via Nacon, and then-- well, that's it.
We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years.
If you have any questions or run into issues with your games, please contact Nacon directly as we'll no longer be able to reply."
I mean… at this point, it feels less like they’re “repositioning” Xbox as a hardware business and more like they’re just slowly ghosting the idea altogether. Outside the US, the console barely registers as a real, properly supported product. In some markets, people genuinely don’t know if it’s still officially sold or if the entire supply now comes from independent importers.
So my guess is that “Xbox” will stop being something you buy and start being something you log into. A brand for streaming, publishing, and apps that eventually becomes completely tied to an active subscription. And if that wasn’t "ambitious" enough, I am betting they will also try to use it as a life raft for their equally shaky AI business. So in the not so distant future, we will probably start seeing Xbox ads sprinkled with the usual AI fairy dust. Maybe it is real time translation powered by intelligence. Maybe it is some cloud side frame generation miracle. Maybe it is just a chatbot acting like a another player, etc.
Either way, I am sure it is coming sooner rather than later, because nothing says the future of gaming quite like another service that really wants you to forget you ever owned anything in the first place.
Good read
the rumors are, their releasing a beast of a console / Pc which will run rings around the the PS6
"its Going to Be a Very Premium, Very High-End Curated Experience" - Xbox president Sarah Bond
Yes, the Xbox brand survived this long.
«Looking at what data the company chooses to report and omit is also quite telling.»
This and the following paragraphs have always been the most telling about Xbox' true health status.
And it, once again, triggers the hypothesis to imagine its true health by simply substracting
• a) Zenimax and ActivisionBlizzardKing's revenue
• b) revenue coming from Playstation releases
Without ABK alone, their annual revenue would had settled somewhere between USD 9-13bn over the past couple of years.
And without revenue coming from Playstation, you could probably cut another USD 1bn, if not more, off of Xbox' overall gaming revenue.
That's why I claim that Xbox' «cost of revenue», especially driven by the invention of Game Pass, is completely out of balance.
And that's why they don't report anything but the most shallow data.
And you can clearly tell, just by reading their latest financial breakdown, the actual transcript verbatim, that once they're finishing the gaming segment breakdown (which belongs to the More Personal Computing segment just for so long), they seemlessly throw in the operating margin of 26.7%, making it seem like that this is their gaming margin.
But it's not, it's the MPC margin.
They're dribbling around Xbox unhealthy state, but to me it's clear as day that Xbox Next won't be what the Xbox community's been believing it's going to be.