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In Microsoft's fiscal year 2025, which spanned from July 2024 to June 2025, gaming revenue reached 23.5 billion U.S. dollars, up from 21.5 billion U.S. dollars in the previous fiscal period. Microsoft's gaming segment includes revenues from Xbox hardware and Xbox content and services, comprising digital transactions, Xbox Game Pass and other subscriptions, video games, third-party video game royalties, cloud services, and advertising.

Microsoft is earning the fruits of its acquisition labor

In recent years, Microsoft has made many strategic acquisitions to grow its gaming segment, and these efforts have paid off. Finally closing its purchase of Activision Blizzard after about 20 months of regulatory negotiations across the globe, this success was immediately reflected in the company’s quarterly gaming revenue, which jumped from 3.9 billion U.S. dollars to 7.1 billion U.S. dollars between October and December 2023. Of course, part of this growth is also the Christmas season, which is responsible for the biggest months in gaming sales. However, revenue in the following quarter settled back to 5.4 billion U.S. dollars, which is significantly higher than the corresponding quarter of the previous year.

Layoffs at Microsoft despite gaming segment growth

Despite Microsoft’s financial success in its gaming segment, the company has announced and performed several rounds of layoffs at many of its owned gaming companies, as well as shuttering some game studios entirely. In January 2024, mere months after closing its record-breaking Activision Blizzard deal, Microsoft laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax, and Xbox employees, citing “areas of overlap” and an “alignment of strategy” and growth. These layoffs are on par with the current state of the industry – an early 2024 survey of game developers found that about a third of respondents had experienced layoffs in the last 12 months.��