Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings report mostly contained good news for the Xbox department. While 2021’s slow release calendar has created a sluggish\u2026<\/b>
\nMicrosoft\u2019s fiscal fourth quarter earnings report mostly contained good news for the Xbox department. While 2021\u2019s slow release calendar has created a sluggish market for third-party games, Xbox reported continued growth on hardware sales and Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. The $3.7 billion is still higher revenue overall than was disclosed in Microsoft\u2019s Q3 report. Microsoft is also heading into a killer holiday season, buoyed by the imminent release of Halo Infinite. For now, however, the last year and a half of meteoric growth for the video game industry appears to be tapering off. Microsoft notes in its report that last year\u2019s big numbers were driven in large part by stay-at-home scenarios, when entertainment-starved customers in social quarantine turned to video games to fill some of the gap. Now that at least some parts of the world have relaxed restrictions, home-based activities like video games are slowing down.2021 has also been a slow overall year for new video game releases. While Microsoft\u2019s first-party titles are on an upswing, with next month\u2019s Psychonauts 2 marking the beginning of a slow but steady release of content, many developers have struggled with production delays due to last year\u2019s work-from-home edicts. As a result, several of the big third-party games that were expected in 2021 have been pushed back to later in the year, if not 2022. Since much of Microsoft\u2019s profit margin on the Xbox depends on software sales, a weak release calendar impacts the company\u2019s content and services gaming revenue. Despite that, Microsoft has quietly grown its audience for the Xbox, with continued high hardware revenue for the Xbox Series X| S. Its ninth-generation console hit store shelves in November and quickly sold out, though some of that has to be attributed to its ongoing supply issues. Microsoft does not include specific hardware revenue numbers in its earnings, and has not revealed sales data for its Xbox Series X| S consoles. The Q4 fiscal report notes an unspecified amount of growth in Xbox Game Pass subscriptions as well, though Microsoft continues to keep quiet about the actual numbers. The last time we heard anything about specifics was January, when Microsoft reported there were 18 million subscribers on Game Pass. Moving forward into the fall of 2021, Xbox owners can look forward to releases such as the aforementioned Psychonauts 2 (Aug.25), the Seattle-produced skateboarding indie SkateBird (Aug.12), Namco Bandai\u2019s latest JRPG Tales of Arise (Sept.10), and Sega\u2019s brawler\/Japanese life sim Lost Judgment (Sept.24), a spin-off from the popular Yakuza series. To some extent, however, we\u2019re all just marking time until Halo Infinite comes out. Microsoft has been uncharacteristically quiet about Infinite\u2018s release date, besides the previously-released \u201choliday 2021,\u201d but the news broke recently that insiders could get to participate in multiplayer testing for Infinite as soon as sometime this week.<\/p>\n