(Jeff Christensen/Getty Images)

Microsoft’s latest earnings show Xbox doing pretty well at everything except selling Xboxes

Microsoft reported that Xbox console sales plunged in the quarter ending in June.

7/31/25 2:09PM

Xbox is still boosting revenue for Microsoft, no thanks to the actual Xbox.

In its most recent earnings report covering its fiscal year, which ended in June, gaming looked pretty rosy for Microsoft. The tech giant said its annual gaming revenue climbed to $23.45 billion, up 9% from last year. About $5 billion of that was from its subscription service, Game Pass (a record). In its fiscal fourth quarter, Microsoft reported that it was the top game publisher on both Xbox and Sony PlayStation consoles.

The only real gaming-related shortcoming for Xbox was, well, the Xbox itself.

Microsoft’s gaming hardware revenue, which includes sales of the Xbox Series X and S consoles, fell 25% this fiscal year. That’s worse than the drops in fiscal 2024 (13%), 2023 (11%), and 2022 (16%). This comes despite Microsoft’s tariff-proofing move of hiking the prices of its consoles in May.

In its most recently reported quarter, Sony said it’s sold 77.8 million PlayStation 5s over the lifetime of the console. While Microsoft hasn’t released Xbox unit sales figures for about a decade, many estimates place the combined lifetime sales of the Series X and S at roughly half that.

These figures are likely behind Microsoft’s strategy of late to shift the public’s perception of what Xbox actually is, from a console that competes with Sony and Nintendo to a gaming platform stretching across handhelds, PCs, phones, and the cloud.

“This is all about building a gaming platform that’s always with you, so you can play the games you want across devices anywhere you want — delivering you an Xbox experience not locked to a single store or tied to one device,” Xbox President Sarah Bond said in a video posted last month about the company’s next generation.

If those plans come to fruition, Xbox would be pivoting out of its rivalry with Sony (which it’s losing) and into competition with platforms like Steam.

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The BBC has become the world’s top news website... by collapsing a little less than its competition

Press Gazette just published its annual look at the biggest news sites in the world across all languages; for the most part, it doesn’t make for particularly pretty reading.

The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.

Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.

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Last night’s Tony Awards were a curtain call for a record-smashing season on Broadway

This year’s star-studded theater awards wrapped up the highest-grossing season Broadway’s ever seen.

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Kids these days are listening to more songs from the good old days

Music nostalgia is in full swing, and the younger listeners of today appear to be partying like it’s pre-1999.

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Drake whiffs on an expected No. 1 on Spotify

Drake started at the bottom and he’s here, but not quite at the top... of Spotify, at least.

It’s been nearly three weeks since Drake dropped his three surprise albums — “Iceman,” “Habibti,” and “Maid of Honour.” Heading into the month, prediction markets were rating it a near certainty, a 98% chance, that Drake’s sonic onslaught was enough to snag the No. 1 slot on Spotify at least once in June.

But, while he surpassed the late Michael Jackson and took up three slots on the Billboard album chart at once, his newly released songs haven’t quite cracked the popular music-streaming platform’s top charts, and market seem to think the moment has passed.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

Spotify’s “Top Songs - Global” chart currently show that Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” which is more than four decades old, Justin Bieber’s “Beauty and a Beat,” which climbed back to the top of Spotify charts following his Coachella set in the spring, Olivia Rodrigo’s new angsty love song “The Cure,” and BTS’s “Swim” are all ahead of Drake’s “STFU Janice” from his “Iceman” album.

While Spotify previously reported last month that Drake’s “Make Them Cry” was the most streamed album in a single day this year, that was later revealed to be a data error.

Prediction markets currently show traders are betting there’s only a 15% chance Drake will have a No. 1 song on Spotify in June.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift is in the lead at 98% — a day before the release of her new original song “I Knew It, I Knew You,” which she wrote and performed for Disney and Pixar’s upcoming “Toy Story 5” — followed by Olivia Rodrigo, whose highly anticipated album “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love” comes out next Friday.