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Xbox Game Pass now boasts 18m subscribers

Xbox Game Pass now boasts 18m subscribers

Microsoft has attracted three million new subscribers to Xbox Game Pass between September and December.

That's according to the Big M's financial call for the three months ending December 31st – as transcribed by Seeking Alpha – where the firm said that this service now boasted 18 million subscribers. That's a 20 per cent increase in three months. Previously Game Pass saw a 50 per cent increase in users between April and September of last year.

CEO Satya Nadella (pictured) also said that Xbox Live had more than 100 million monthly active users, which is in-line with the company's previous reports about its online services.

The exec said that Microsoft's games business surpassed $5 billion in revenue for the quarter – a first for the firm – a 51 per cent increase year-on -year. Meanwhile, hardware revenue was up 86 per cent year-on-year off the back of the launch of its new Xbox Series X and Series S consoles, which the Big M said were the "most successful in our history."

Xbox content and services revenue rose 40 per cent off the back of its first-party line-up, Game Pass and third-party releases. These drove $2 billion in revenue for the period.

“What we have witnessed over the past year is the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry," Nadella said in a press release.

“Building their own digital capability is the new currency driving every organisation’s resilience and growth. Microsoft is powering this shift with the world’s largest and most comprehensive cloud platform.”


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.