Amazon’s Fallout TV show has rightly earned about nine million plaudits since it came out, and the latest comes from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. During a call outlining the company’s latest batch of financial numbers, we’ve learned the extent to which the show boosted the player counts of Fallout titles on Game Pass.
Touching on the show, which recently recieved a bunch of Emmy nominations and was renewed for a second season faster than you can bring up VATS, Nadella revealed (thanks, IGN) that “hours played on Game Pass for the Fallout franchise increased nearly 5x quarter-over-quarter” following the show’s arrival.
While we already knew that Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell running around California had done wonders for the amounts of folks delving back into Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Fallout New Vegas, and their predecessors, Microsoft hadn’t previously outlined the effect it’d had on Game Pass specifically.
Alongside that number, Nadella had plenty more to whip out while discussing how Microsoft’s gaming divion is doing. Both Xbox’s gaming revenue and its content and services revenue are up year-over-year by 44% and 61%, though it is worth noting a lot of that grow is due to the impact of the Activision Blizzard acquisition, which wasn’t there to be influencing these numbers last year, since it only fully closed in October.
In fact, as Kotaku’s Ethan Gach has pointed out, in the case of the gaming revenue specifically, the company would have actually been down by 4% without the 48 points of revenue attributed to Activision Blizzard. In terms of content and services, it’d still be up, but only by 3%. This is similar to last quarter, which would also have seen Xbox’s gaming revenue be down 4% without ActiBlizz, while content and services would have been in the green by just 1%.
Meanwhile, the recent trend of hardware sales generally dipping or plateauing – which isn’t limited to just Xbox – has continued, with this earnings report noting it’s down 42% year-over-year, an increase on last quarter’s mark of a 31% year-over-year drop in console sales.
