Microsoft reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2013 today. The company missed its guidance due to “the decline in the PC market,” but it found some good news in Xbox Live.
The corporation reported that Xbox Live transaction revenue was up 20 percent in Q4. That means the sales of games, downloadable content, and items saw a significant bump from April 1 through June 30. That’s before Microsoft even held its “Ultimate Game Sale” that started July 1, which brought deep discounts to many of the biggest games on the Xbox Live Marketplace.
“We continue to see strong demand for our enterprise and cloud offerings, resulting in a record unearned revenue balance this quarter. We also saw increasing consumer demand for services like Office 365, Outlook.com, Skype, and Xbox Live,” Microsoft chief financial officer Amy Hood said. “While we have work ahead of us, we are making the focused investments needed to deliver on long-term growth opportunities like cloud services.”
Xbox Live Gold currently costs $9.99 a month, $24.99 for three months, or $59.99 for a full year.
Microsoft plans to continue focusing on Xbox Live and online services for its next-gen Xbox One console. Xbox Live currently has around 46 million users, according to the last count, and many of those gamers pay a regular fee for the Xbox Live Gold premium subscription.
To keep those gamers satisfied, the company plans to introduce more cloud services that improve online games on Xbox One. It also began offering free games to Xbox Live Gold subscribers in June.