Microsoft published its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2027, covering the period from July to September 2026, and CEO Satya Nadella told analysts during the earnings call on October 28, 2026, that Minecraft had a record quarter, hitting historic highs in both engagement and revenue. That's yet another record for the Mojang game over the past year, even as Microsoft's broader gaming division, including Xbox hardware, keeps performing worse and worse.

What Nadella said about Minecraft

During the call with analysts, Nadella described Minecraft as a game that keeps breaking its own records almost a decade after Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang. He said the game had a quarter with "historic highs in both engagement and revenue," a quote highlighted in the earnings coverage by playday.one. In the same remarks, the Microsoft CEO also mentioned that World of Warcraft had just gone through the biggest beta in the series' history, showing that the gaming division is leaning on older, established franchises as a driver of engagement growth.

Nadella didn't give a specific number for Minecraft's active users or the revenue generated by the game this quarter. Microsoft hasn't broken out individual titles' financial results in its investor reports for years, sticking instead to general statements about records and aggregate numbers for the whole Xbox segment.

Xbox as a whole loses revenue for the fourth straight quarter

Minecraft's record stands in contrast to the rest of the gaming segment's results. Xbox content and services revenue fell 2% year over year (1% in constant currency) this quarter to $5.379 billion, compared to $5.508 billion a year earlier, according to Shacknews. That marks the fourth consecutive quarter of decline in this category. Xbox hardware revenue shrank even more sharply, down 14% year over year, while the entire Devices and Consumer segment, which includes gaming, fell 3% to $15.5 billion.

Microsoft attributes the drop in content and services revenue to an overall softening in Xbox Game Pass revenue and third-party content, which only partially offset growth in first-party content sales, meaning games published directly by Microsoft's own studios. CFO Amy Hood said that next quarter, covering the holiday season, Xbox content and services revenue should grow at a "mid-to-high single-digit percentage" rate, after which growth is expected to slow noticeably in the third and fourth quarters of the fiscal year.

Minecraft is growing against the broader trend

Minecraft's strong showing isn't a one-off. A year earlier, during the earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 in October 2025, Nadella reported that the game had reached 155 million monthly active users at the time, a record then driven largely by the success of "A Minecraft Movie." The current record suggests the game's popularity hasn't faded along with the movie's release buzz, and is in fact still growing.

That's backed up by other numbers Microsoft has announced in recent months. On September 26, 2026, during the September edition of Minecraft Live, Xbox head Asha Sharma reported that the game had passed 425 million copies sold, with around 300,000 new players joining every day. That growth spans the whole brand regardless of platform: it applies both to people using Minecraft Java Edition on computers and those playing Minecraft Bedrock Edition on consoles, phones and tablets. Regular updates, which we cover on an ongoing basis in our versions section, seem to be keeping players interested even though the base game is now well over a decade old.

A tough year for console hardware

The contrast between Xbox's software and hardware sides keeps getting starker. In August 2026, Microsoft raised console prices for the second time in less than a year: the Xbox Series X 1TB model went up by $150, and the 2TB variant was discontinued entirely. These moves are part of a broader hardware market crisis tied to rising component costs and import tariffs, as Shacknews noted in its coverage of the results.

For Microsoft, this means the future of its gaming division increasingly depends on content and brands that function independently of any particular console, such as Minecraft, Call of Duty, or World of Warcraft, and less on sales of Xbox hardware itself. Microsoft's next quarterly results, covering the holiday season, will typically come out in late January, and that's the very quarter Amy Hood flagged as the point where Xbox content and services revenue growth should be strongest for the whole fiscal year.

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