Buried in Vole’s latest earnings report, this significant drop continues a prolonged decline in Vole's gaming hardware sales—the Xbox line has experienced year-over-year revenue declines in six of the last seven calendar quarters (and seven of the last nine).

Vole's CFO, Amy Hood, informed investors in a follow-up call that hardware sales are expected to decline again in the upcoming fiscal quarter, ending in September.

The 42 per cent drop in quarterly hardware revenue is the largest since the Xbox Series X/S launched in 2020, following an 11 per cent year-over-year decline in the second calendar quarter of 2023.

Microsoft no longer talks about console shipment numbers like its competitors, so the exact number of Xbox consoles sold remains unknown. However, industry analyst Daniel Ahmad estimates that Vole sold fewer than 900,000 Xbox units for the quarter ending in March, compared to 4.5 million PS5 units shipped in the same period.

The revenue figures suggest that sales of the Xbox Series X/S peaked in 2022, during the console's second full year on the market. This is unusual for a market where successful console hardware typically sees a peak in the fourth or fifth year before a gradual decline leading up to a successor.

Aside from hardware sales, Vole's gaming content and services revenue increased by an impressive 61 per cent year-over-year for the latest reported quarter. However, 58 per cent of that increase was attributed to the "net impact from the Activision acquisition," which cost the company $68.7 billion.