It’s always hard to get numbers at Microsoft. The financial reports speak more of evolution than nominal values. During his speech at WSJ Live, Phil Spencer spoke regarding the share of Game Pass subscriptions in the income of Microsoft’s gaming activity. The least we can say, they are not insignificant!
Game Pass as a share of our content and service revenue is probably 15%. I don’t think it gets any bigger than that. I think overall revenue is going up, so 15% of a bigger number, but we don’t have that future where 50-70% of our revenue comes from subscriptions.
Phil Spencer
This is a rare glimpse of Microsoft’s Game Pass and gaming activity more globally. All the more interesting given that Spencer himself doesn’t think the service will dominate the Seattle giant’s revenue.
One of the reasons would be the finite number of Xbox console owners who can subscribe to the service. Indeed, the growth highlighted in the first quarter financial results is that of PC and non-console subscriptions. With an increase of 159%, this will take on a more important place in comparison in the future.
We are seeing incredible growth on PC…. On console, I’ve seen the growth slow down, mostly because at some point you’ve reached every console owner who wants to subscribe.
