Microsoft shared financial details for FY23 Q3 on Wednesday, announcing that the company’s gaming revenue was up 5% year-over-year for the quarter ending March 31, 2025.
Specifically, Xbox content and services saw growth of 8% year-over-year, which the company attributes to growth across its Call of Duty and Minecraft brands, as well as growth in the Xbox Game Pass subscription service. Hardware revenue was down 6% year-of-year.
Overall, Microsoft saw $70.1 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 11% year-over-year. Net income was $25.8 billion, up 18% year-over-year.
Why are Call of Duty, Minecraft, and Xbox Game Pass seeing growth?
During the earnings call accompanying the financial results, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted that Xbox Cloud Gaming passed 150 million hours of usage for the first time this quarter. Nadella added that PC Game Pass revenue increased 45% year-over-year.
According to Nadella, Microsoft was the top publisher for the quarter in preorders and preinstalls on Xbox and PlayStation.
The prior quarter saw the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, a game which has continued to sell well and almost assuredly generate high amounts of revenue from microtransactions.
As for Minecraft, the series has been abuzz thanks to chatter around A Minecraft Movie, which released in theaters back on April 4, 2025. Nadella noted that weekly active users of Minecraft were up 75% since the movie’s launch.
This quarter saw the launch of one major Xbox first-party title with Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed, a fantasy role-playing game set in the world of Eora, which is also the setting for the studio’s Pillars of Eternity games.
Looking ahead to FY25 Q4
The next quarter should be extremely interesting for Xbox, as the company launched an utter cavalcade of titles. April alone has seen the launch of Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight and Bethesda Game Studios’ The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered.
Stoic’s Towerborne is also available on Xbox consoles now via Xbox Game Preview, while Playground Games’ Forza Horizon 5 and MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launched on PlayStation 5. Looking ahead, May will see the arrival of id Software’s DOOM: The Dark Ages.
