Activision made 27% of Xbox's yearly earnings

Activision Blizzard King helped Microsoft achieve new record-breaking annual games revenues as the publisher continues raking in billions from service-oriented games.

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Microsoft's latest FY24 results gave us key insights on the health of the Xbox business. According to the data, the Xbox brand managed to pull in $21.5 billion throughout July 2023 - June 2024, a new all-time high for the video games unit. The +39% year-over-year revenue growth was driven primarily by software, services, subscriptions, and monetization--a segment that Microsoft refers to as Content & Services--whereas hardware declined slightly by 13% to $2.87 billion.

Activision was a significant driver for Xbox's growth, and helped the division finally break the $20 billion mark. But how much did Activision contribute? Is the costly $70 billion merger having a positive impact on the business? The raw figures say yes, but we also have to wonder about Xbox's overall performance sans Activision. Microsoft's quarterly financial results gave us some clues, at least on a more basic level.

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To answer this, I took the Activision revenue impact values that Microsoft provided for the Q2 - Q4 periods (combined, this amounted to around $5.73 billion) and simply subtracted that from Xbox's total $21.525 billion revenues.

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The results showed some interesting trends which we've included below. One warning, though: This math is not perfect and is based on simple arithmetic that's been aligned with historical comparisons. Microsoft often hides and obfuscates Xbox data and this can make it hard to compare, so keep that in mind with the following figures.

Based on our findings, Xbox only grew around ~2% without Activision's contributions, and would have made around $15.795 billion throughout the year.

Microsoft's best-ever year for gaming was FY22, where it managed to rake in $16.23 billion.

With Activision, Xbox's total revenues grew by +39%, of which Xbox made up 73% and Activision around 27%.

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ATVI Net Impact on Xbox's FY24 results

• Q1 - None
• Q2 - $2.08 billion
• Q3 - $1.97 billion
• Q4 - $1.68 billion