14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced its financial results for the last quarter of 2014 and judging from the numbers, it looks like the company had a tough Q4 when it comes to Xbox sales.
Although the number may seem impressive at first glance, let's not forget that Microsoft offered a combined number, so it's hard to tell exactly how many Xbox One and Xbox 360 are included in the 6.6 million total number.
It also worth mentioning that these are shipped units, not sold. This is a decrease of 800k consoles in comparison with the same quarter last year when Microsoft announced it had shipped 7.4 million Xbox consoles.
On top of that, Microsoft announced that Xbox platform revenue had decreased by 20%, most likely due to the price cuts made to the Xbox One during the holiday season.
This is probably what hurt Microsoft most, but the Redmond-based company plans to regain some of the lost revenue by selling services to those who purchased the new Xbox One consoles in the last few months.
Furthermore, Microsoft claims that Xbox 360 sales declined due to customer preference for new generation consoles, which means there aren't that many old-gen consoles included in the 6.6 million Xbox units sold for the quarter ended December 31, 2014.
Devices & Consumer division's revenues increased due to major games
The good news is that the Devices & Consumer division's Other category had a 30% increase in revenue thanks to “higher revenue from first-party video games” mostly driven by Minecraft (following the acquisition of Mojang), Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Forza Horizon 2.
Xbox Live resale revenue is up 42% as well, mostly driven by higher Xbox Live transactions. These numbers may improve in the next months, but there's no telling by how much.
On a side note, Sony is expected to announce its financial results for the same period on February 4 and it will be interesting to see how many PlayStation consoles the Japanese company was able to ship compared to Microsoft.
