Microsoft’s gaming ecosystem has reached a new milestone. But is it possible to estimate the share of Activision Blizzard games and their impact on the number of monthly active users?
As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told investors during an earnings call, Xbox now has “over 500 million monthly active users [MAU] across platforms and devices.”
He didn’t disclose how MAUs are distributed across the company’s gaming division, but it is safe to assume that Activision Blizzard games make up the lion’s share of total active players.
Before being acquired by Microsoft in October 2023, Activision always shared MAU numbers in its financial statements. The Q2 2023 report was the last time the Call of Duty maker publicly disclosed this information. So here is the number of active users of the company’s segments as of June 30, 2023:
- Activision — 92 million MAU, of which 90 million are from Call of Duty;
- Blizzard — 26 million MAU;
- King — 238 million MAU.
At the time, monthly active users were down both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, but Activision Blizzard still boasted an impressive 356 million MAU. However, we don’t know how the numbers have changed since then.
In January 2024, Nadella said Microsoft set “all-time records” for monthly active users in Q2 FY24. PC and Xbox numbers remained undisclosed, but the company surpassed 200 million MAU on mobile alone (largely driven by King’s portfolio). He added that “with our acquisition, we’ve added hundreds of millions of gamers to our ecosystem.”
If Activision Blizzard’s MAU remained at 350 million, the rest of the Xbox division would be left with about 150 million MAU. Even if the numbers have dropped slightly since June 30, 2023, Activision likely still accounts for more than half of Xbox’s 500 monthly active users.
The impact of the Activision Blizzard acquisition on the Xbox business cannot be overstated. Microsoft’s gaming revenue grew 44% in Q4 FY24, but without Activision, it would have fallen 4% year-over-year. Xbox content and services revenue increased 61%, with 58 points of the net impact from the Call of Duty maker.
When I think about the Activision portfolio, it comes with great assets for us to cover both the PC and the console, and then, of course, assets to cover mobile sockets, which we never had. We feel that now, we have both the content and the ability to access all the traditional high scale platforms where people play games, which is the console, PC and mobile.
CEO of Microsoft
With Xbox hardware revenue down 42% in Q4, Microsoft continues to look for new areas of growth for its gaming business. Nadella called video games, combined with services (Game Pass, cloud) and “transaction revenue” (e.g. royalties from third-party titles), “our long-term KPI.” “That’s what we’re building towards, and that was this strategy behind Activision as an asset,” he concluded.