Despite the amount of unfortunate lay-offs throughout 2024, company acquisition is meant to boost the revenue of companies, and there is no better example of that than with Xbox. Since the company’s rather infamous acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft has seen its gaming revenue skyrocket; if its earnings reports are anything to go by.
According to Microsoft’s Q3 earnings report for 2024, the company has seen a revenue increase of up to 51% year-over-year, or $1.8 billion, for a total of $5.45 billion. As impressive as this sounds, a large majority of said revenue didn’t come from first party Xbox content, which was down 4%. Instead, over 55 points of the net impact came from content related to Activision Blizzard. Unfortunately, this does seem to be becoming a recurring theme, as the same drop was seen last quarter.
That’s not to say Xbox’s brand as a whole didn’t do well, as the company had a 62% year-on-year climb, but with a 61 points net impact from Activision Blizzard, that gain only equates to about 1% for everything else. While hardware wasn’t affected by the acquisition, there is a downward trend in revenue of 31% due to a lack of console sales. There are a multitude of other factors to consider when you look at how Activision Blizzard is affecting the company such as operating costs, research and development, and even sales and marketing expenses that all form part of the overall cost when it comes to acquisitions.
Understandably, only time will tell how well Activision Blizzard will perform and if Microsoft will make back its nearly $69 billion investment. Despite seeing it’s gaming revenue increase, the company did unfortunately have to layoff over 1,900 people as a part of cost-cutting measures across most of Xbox.
