Satya Nadella made an interesting claim in Microsoft’s last quarterly report.
To quote Nadella directly from their earnings call, he said this:
“We continue to transform the business and focus on margin expansion, as we bring our games to over 500 million monthly active users across devices.
We ended the quarter as the top publisher by pre-orders and pre-installs on both Xbox and the PlayStation Store.
PC Game Pass revenue increased over 45% year-over-year.”
As reported by Jez Corden for Windows Central, Microsoft also told investors that this last quarter once again set the record for Xbox’s best quarter on record, with an increase of 8 % year over year. Xbox console sales dipped by 6 % year over year but even this is a positive sign. Their consoles are no longer continuing to trend downward and could conceivably make a turnaround.
But we think the claim that Microsoft has become PlayStation’s biggest publisher will surprise most gamers. To some degree, we already knew that Microsoft was bound to reach this milestone. The combined breadth and depth of Activision, Blizzard, and Bethesda, not to mention the rest of Microsoft’s studios, already makes them one of the biggest in terms of number of studios alone.
We also saw that Microsoft is in a particularly strong run with their multiplayer games, after the success of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. While Forza Horizon 5, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered have released on PlayStation 5, Microsoft still also has Doom: The Dark Ages on the way. But we believe what gamers failed to notice was that Microsoft’s big competitor and publishing partner, Sony, is struggling to get their own game releases in a proper cadence. This year, Sony has Ghost of Yōtei and Marathon, and they are also publishing Ultizero Games’ Lost Soul Aside.
Microsoft already outnumbers Sony’s output on Sony’s console, but they also have other games they have kept exclusive, such as Avowed and South of Midnight. And there are even more games on the way, including Towerborne and this year’s Call of Duty. Perhaps PlayStation players only see the games benefiting themselves, and hence only see Microsoft’s games coming to their console as a positive for Sony and a negative for Microsoft. But Sony’s software division is definitely feeling the pressure of not being as productive and successful as Microsoft is at the moment.
Nintendo may be looking at these developments with interest as well. Microsoft has the numbers in terms of manpower, studios, and money, to become a bigger publisher than Nintendo on the Switch 2 too. While Microsoft is unlikely to unseat Nintendo as the most popular brand or with the most successful franchises on Nintendo’s platforms, Microsoft could very well become the most dominant company in the industry, on the strength of their games being successful in every platform available.
