Microsoft has released its fiscal information for the final quarter of 2025, as well as for the year as a whole, and despite thousands of layoffs earlier this month, the company's revenue continues to climb.
Per its Q4 earnings release, Microsoft's revenue grew by 15% for the year overall, and its quarterly revenue jumped by 18% when compared to last year's Q4 earnings. There's pretty much no area in which Microsoft's finances aren't growing.
When it comes to Xbox, Microsoft's gaming wing is doing just fine as well. The Xbox division saw its "content and services revenue" increase by 13% compared to last year's fourth quarter, and, as noted by TweakTown's Derek Strickland, Xbox earned a record-breaking $23.45 billion in revenue this fiscal year.
In an accompanying earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that Xbox now has "500 million monthly active users across platforms and devices", and that it is the "top publisher on both Xbox and PlayStation this quarter", although one would hope Xbox is the top publisher on its own hardware, honestly.
Nadella says that revenue from Game Pass reached "nearly $5 billion for the first time", which feels like another slightly strange way to phrase the achievement; "nearly" reaching a figure for the first time doesn't quite feel like the win Nadella seems to think it is.
Still, these figures will be very encouraging for Microsoft, although they won't be anywhere near as encouraging for the nearly-9,000 employees (there's that word again!) who lost their jobs as part of a massive layoff wave earlier this month.
That layoff wave also saw Xbox subsidiaries like Rare and The Initiative affected; the former's Everwild was canceled, while the latter's Perfect Dark reboot was shuttered, along with the studio as a whole.
Between those layoffs and several earlier rounds of job cuts, it feels particularly galling that Nadella took home an eye-watering payrise back in October, but that's just the hyper-corporate world we live in, I suppose.
Whether or not Microsoft and Xbox continuing to do these kinds of numbers will affect their approach to keeping staff on in the future is unclear, but I suspect the answer is no. Stay tuned for more.
