Halo Infinite has been played by more than 20 million gamers since the game was released, Microsoft announced. This makes the game the ‘biggest Halo launch’ ever. The game has free-to-play multiplayer; the publisher does not say how many gamers have played the single player.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella cites the figure of 20 million players in the company’s quarterly figures and does not say how many consumers have bought the game or played through a Game Pass subscription. Microsoft’s Gaming arm delivered eight percent more than a year earlier, Xbox hardware delivered four percent more. The latter figure is higher than Microsoft expected, the company says it could be higher because it was able to ship more consoles than expected.
Revenue from Microsoft’s content and service business rose ten percent, which was lower than expected. While the company managed to sell more first-party games and Game Pass subscriptions, games from third-party developers are said to have delivered less than expected. Microsoft now has over 25 million Game Pass subscribers.
Microsoft’s quarterly revenue was $51.7 billion, net income was $18.8 billion. These amounts are respectively 20 and 21 percent more than a year earlier. The biggest climber was Intelligent Cloud, up 26 percent to $18.3 billion. This was in part because Azure “and other cloud services” grew by 46 percent, allowing revenue from server products and cloud services to grow by 29 percent.
More Personal Computing delivered 15 percent more, or $17.5 billion. This was due to Windows OEM revenue growing by a quarter and Search and news advertising revenues growing 32 percent. This also includes the Xbox branch. Productivity and Business Processes brought in $15.9 billion, or 19 percent more. This is because LinkedIn delivered 37 percent more sales and because the number of Office subscribers increased. Now Microsoft has 56.4 million 365 consumer subscribers.