Xbox has 20 video game franchises that have earned $1 billion

Microsoft officially confirms that it has 20 video game franchises that have each grossed $1 billion in game sales and microtransactions.

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A year ago, after Microsoft closed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, we attempted to wrangle up the top billion-dollar franchises that Xbox now owns. After all, Activision had a total of 8x separate franchises that each earned over $1 billion in revenue before the Microsoft buyout. Matching that up with other games in Microsoft's already-sizable first-party lineup, we came up with the number 17.

That number is actually a bit higher. In a recent annual report filing, Microsoft says that it owns 20 billion-dollar gaming franchises.

And one of these franchises, Call of Duty, has made more than $31 billion in revenue.

We are bringing great games to more people on more devices. With our acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, which closed October 2023, we've added hundreds of millions of players to our ecosystem.

We now have 20 franchises that have generated over $1 billion in lifetime revenue--from Candy Crush, Diablo, and Halo, to Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, and Gears of War.

And with Xbox cloud gaming, we continue to innovate to offer players more ways to experience the games they love-where, when, and how they want.

Finally, we brought four of our fan-favorite titles to Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation for the first time, as we continue to extend our content to new platforms

What's most interesting is that as of October 2023, during a Q1 earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Xbox had around 13x franchises of this caliber:

"With Activision Blizzard King, we will now add significant depth to our content portfolio. We will have 13 billion dollar-plus franchises - from Candy Crush, Diablo, and Halo, to Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, and Gears of War."

Below are the franchises that we came up with, but obviously there are more:

1. Halo
2. Minecraft
3. Forza
4. Age of Empires
5. Flight Simulator
6. Gears of War
7. Call of Duty
8. Candy Crush
9. Warcraft
10. Diablo
11. Overwatch
12. Guitar Hero
13. Tony Hawk
14. Crash Bandicoot
15. The Elder Scrolls
16. Fallout
17. Doom