Microsoft just became the third US company in history to pass a market cap of $1 trillion after posting its third quarter financial results. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that its gaming output wasn’t the main drive behind this success, however.
As it turns out, Microsoft’s gaming performance was actually fairly disappointing. Though the company did report a 5 percent year-over-year jump in related revenue, the $2.36 billion it pulled in from video games was “lower than expected.”
That hasn’t stopped Microsoft from seeing gaming as a “massive opportunity” of course, with the tech giant bragging of “record user engagement” that it’ll no doubt now be looking to transform into actual revenue.
This engagement mostly came down the Xbox One console, though Microsoft’s PC revenue also 8 percent to $10.7 billion last quarter and was “better than expected.”
Microsoft’s chief financial officer Amy Hood said:
In Windows, the overall PC market was stronger than we anticipated driven by improved chip supply that met both unfulfilled Q2 commercial and premium consumer demand as well as better than expected Q3 commercial demand.
Microsoft actually saw the biggest gains in its cloud revenue, with a 41 percent rise year-over-year. This will no doubt help the company’s gaming arm reaffirm its commitment to a cloud based future.
Microsoft joins Amazon and Apple as one of the few companies in the US to hit the $1 trillion mark. I can actually feel myself getting a nosebleed just trying to imagine what it’d be like to even be near that amount of money.
While a variety of factors dictate whether or not Microsoft can keep these good times rolling, the company seems pretty confident that it’s got some big stuff to show off at E3 2019 to get everyone excited for the year ahead.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.