The Xbox One and Xbox 360 are reaching stores

Microsoft confirms in its latest financial earnings report that it's shipped between July 1 and September 30 2.4 million Xbox consoles, meaning both Xbox One and Xbox 360, and that gaming is becoming more and more important for the corporation overall.

Microsoft rolled out the Xbox One back in November of last year, but the console failed to meet sales expectations, largely due to mixed messages about its stance on used gaming, always-on internet requirement, and other such things.

Fortunately for the large corporation, things are looking up, as after a price cut in June and many other strategic bundles, the Xbox One is becoming a more appealing product around the world.

Around 2.4 million Xbox consoles were sold recently

Now, thanks to the latest financial earnings report, Microsoft brings forward fresh figures in regards to the popularity of its Xbox consoles. In the company's first quarter of the 2015 financial year, which lasts from July 1 to September 30, 2014, around 2.4 million Xbox units have been shipped to retailers from around the world.

The figure covers both the Xbox One and the old Xbox 360, and Microsoft doesn't offer a breakdown of how many of each console it shipped during the last quarter. It does, however, emphasize that it represents a growth of 102% over the same period in 2013, although such a thing isn't shocking, considering many fans had been waiting for the Xbox One to release in November.

Gaming is helping Microsoft overall

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also expresses the importance of the gaming division inside the large corporation, as plenty of know-how from the Kinect sensor was used in the Cortana assistant that's now available on Windows smartphones, and soon enough, on the Windows 10 operating system.

"Gaming is the one category we have said that we will invest in it for its own sake, in driving enterprise value our of our gaming, but there are in fact lots of benefits, which come because of technology. In fact the reason why we’re so competitive now in Cortana and speech recognition which I think is core to productivity, it first started with Kinect and Xbox," he says, via SeekingAlpha.

The executive also touches on the recent acquisition of Minecraft and its developer, Mojang, saying that it will help grow the company's influence in terms of gaming both on consoles as well as on the PC platform.

"We want to have our first party gaming, Xbox Live, Console and as well as PC gaming thrive and drive our incremental value for us, and Minecraft obviously helps in that context. So that’s how we’ll view the future for how we think about our businesses."

Microsoft plans to debut Windows 10 as a unified operating system, not just on PC but also on the Xbox One, not to mention smartphones, tablets, and more, so expect to see some intriguing things from the large corporation.


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