No, it says right there that the primary reason for decline is decrease in volume of consoles sold.
That line says software and services with the software being blamed on third parties and the subs keeping the number from being even worse.
That's software + services for the quarter alone. There will have been a massive software decline given how badly Crackdown 3 flopped, it won't have been selling any further copies by Q4. And considering the same quarter last year Microsoft had just launched Sea of Thieves like a week prior, and also launched State of Decay 2 (which reached #1 on May US NPD).
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Nadella has been pushing cloud/services big time. he has also been signing on some big names and pushing more enterprise services/products, it will only get bigger and they stand to make a lot more from Azure. They've also been doubling down on innovative new software products. They just signed on two major voting machine companies to use their new election guard software.
Cloud performance is gonna be part of the bulk of how this comes around as a whole. If it remains improving THIS gen, that builds the foundation.
It's shit. But there's no spinning necessary. Quite the opposite, Phil has been pretty honest about the state of affairs over recent years, gaming being treated like a 'garage band' within Microsoft, lack of investment etc. This is the result of that. And despite big changes internally, and their new found mojo and confidence, it'll be next gen before we see the results.
I was being facetious and a little naughty.
You can't blame it on third party sales when you offer gamepass which is actual reason for their reduced sales.
Reduced third party game sales. Why buy it when you will eventually have it on gamepass. It isn't such a leap in logic. It's not the full picture but it's one of the reasons.
