Microsoft's earnings better than expected and Starfield led to a new record

Microsoft has just delivered their latest earnings report (July - September) and as usual, they are making a lot of money, even surpassing the expected outcome. They made $56.5 billion in revenue, versus the analysts expectation $54.5 billion, and the net income was $22.3 billion. This means that a third of the total price of Activision Blizzard ($68.7 billion) has been covered in just three months.

Behind these numbers are a 4% increase in revenue for Windows, 15% for Office, 19% for intelligent cloud business and a 29% increase for other cloud services. Gaming and Xbox also assisted the nice result with a total 9% increase in revenue (despite Xbox hardware revenue dropping 7%), with Game Pass doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The subscription service's revenue increased 13%, something Starfield certainly contributed to. The Microsoft boss Satya Nadella said:

"On launch we set a record for the most Game Pass subscriptions added on a single day ever."

Next time we get a quarterly report from Microsoft (late January for the period October - December), it will include the Activision Blizzard numbers, which definitely will change a lot. For the gaming revenue, Microsoft expects an increase of 45-49% and services is expected to grow 55-59%.