11% increase in store transactions adds a little context, however, still tells us little about the health of their gaming business (e.g. those store transactions could be sales of media content). Also, why are you trying to redefine their business model just to argue that hardware sales aren't important? Seems like an illogical position to me.
Their Xbox business is a console business. If they don't sell consoles then they can't grow their software and royalty revenues. That's pretty clear. We're talking about the health of the Xbox as a platform and to have a healthy platform we should be seeing growth in unit sales of console hardware as well as software sales and royalty revenues. If we aren't, there should be cause for concern.
I don't understand why you insist on willfully ignoring this fact...
Clearly, their Xbox business isn't tanking. They're bringing in reasonably good revenue numbers, but the principal indicators of longer-term success for the platform (i.e. hardware unit sales) are lagging well behind their competitors in a evidently very healthy console gaming market.
Yes... because the stock price reflects only the performance of MS' gaming division. /s
You're being rather disingenuous here.
Your whole point falls down around you buy saying Xbox is a console business, its not, its a platform. That's why the reporting has been updated to reflect that. Yeah, hardware is a big chunk of it, but as long as the end-goal of store monetization is on the healthy rise, which it is, then its a good outlook.
I love people taking stuff out of context. If one of their billion dollar revenue divisions (Windows, Surface, Gaming, Office, Bing and Cloud) was performing poorly, the stock price would reflect it.
From the outlook of MSFT stock, its got a positive outlook and they've well passed their high of 1999 buy quite a margin.
You're just trying hard to spin this into a negative for Xbox. Just because the PS4 is performing excellently, doesn't mean the Xbox is performing shit.
Its like Apple vs Android. Android has way more market share than Apple by a huge margin, are Apple performing poorly? Nope.