Xbox Game Pass, PC and the cloud gave Microsoft record profits

It's this time of year when quarterly reports are being delivered, and late Tuesday, it was Microsoft's turn. And they had a really qood quarter (October - December) with huge increase that ended with $15.5 billion net income. As many analysts pointed out, they actually made more money in one quarter that it would cost Microsoft to buy Bethesda twice.

So what was behind all this? One of the main contributors is reportedly a rebounding PC market that is currently seeing huge growth. Maybe a result of people working from home, needing new equipment. Surface also continues to do really well and grew with 3% and is now a $2 billion business for the first time. Their cloud business also increased a lot (between 21-26% for different divisions), as did the Azure servers which increased 50%.

So what about Xbox? Well, it increased a lot as well and contributed, as Xbox Game Pass now has +18 million subscribers (up from 15 million in September), and 100 million monthly active users on Xbox Live. Xbox Content and Services grew by 40% and now actually has higher revenue alone than what the whole Xbox Gaming (which Content and Services is a part of) division had the same quarter in 2019.

Xbox hardware also increased by 86%, which is of course a result of the Xbox Series S/X launch, and it boosted Gaming revenue up 51%. Microsoft do add, however, that the console will be supply constrained until March 31 at the very least.