The talk of the last 12 months has been around how well the Nintendo Switch has been selling and the fact that Sony has been slaughtering Microsoft when it comes to first-party games, but when you compare the actual revenue made between all there businesses, Microsoft surprisingly did quite well with the Xbox business.
Talking in American dollars, the Xbox business made $10.35 billion dollars in the period from July 1st to June 30th (2017-2018), Nintendo made $9.7 billion dollars and Sony made a whopping $17.29 billion dollars.
What we take from this is the fact that these online services play a massive part in these companies making money. Great games are obviously a good thing, but it just proves that the monthly service charge that Microsoft and Sony are raking in are the most important to their business.
Microsoft’s Xbox brand grew 39% in revenue in the last financial year with Xbox Live monthly users growing 8% to 57 million. Obviously Game Pass played a big part in this too, which is gaining more and more popularity as the months roll on.
It’s worth noting that Sony/Nintendo’s financial years are March>April, which shouldn’t make too much of a significant difference as they both include the all important holiday period.
With Nintendo Switch’s online set to launch in September, next year’s data will be incredibly interesting. With the Xbox One X boosting Microsoft’s sales data and the Nintendo Switch having another big holiday with both Super Smash Bros Ultimate as well as Pokemon Let’s Go hitting stores. Sony is also set to have another bumper holiday with Spider-Man launching and The Last Of Us 2 not being too far away. There’s also room for Sony to slash the price of both the PlayStation and PS4 Pro, which would definitely help them push more units into the holiday season.
