Microsoft is the world’s biggest game publisher as of last month, according to data firm Ampere. Read on to learn more about this feat and what it means for the company.
Microsoft Is The World’s Biggest Publisher
Call Of Duty Is Their Most Popular Title
As reported by VGC, data firm Ampere concluded in their report that Microsoft is the world’s biggest game publisher across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles as of December 2024. A total of $465 million USD was spent on Microsoft-published games over December with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 as its best-selling title, which garnered over 38 million monthly users.
The holiday season also saw the launch of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which contributed to another portion of Microsoft’s revenue for that month. The action-adventure title was among the best-selling video games during its launch week in the United States, second only to the aforementioned Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
With Microsoft’s shift to a multi-format strategy, making Microsoft-owned and published titles available on PC and PlayStation instead of Xbox exclusives significantly helped the tech giant’s profits and overall visibility in the market. In fact, 64% of consumer spending on Microsoft titles in the month of December were on the PlayStation consoles, most of which were titles from the Call of Duty series. On Christmas Day alone, there were about 20 million hours spent playing Call of Duty by players across the globe, further supporting its popularity.
Coming in second place was Electronic Arts, widely known as EA, with over $366 million USD in revenue in the same period. EA’s hotshot title was EA Sports FC 25, contributing a large percentage of the total despite having lesser sales compared to its counterpart from last year.
Marvel Rivals and Path of Exile 2 Pave The Way For Chinese Publishers
It has also been a good month for Chinese publishers, with the top two standout titles for the month of December coming from Tencent and Netease.
Netease’s free-to-play team arena shooter Marvel Rivals attracted 29 million monthly users during the holiday season, while Tencent’s Path of Exile 2 generated a revenue of an estimated $148 million USD. Tencent also had team-based tactical shooter Delta Force under their wing, which helped boost their numbers up even higher. As a result, these two Chinese publishers made it into Ampere’s monthly rankings for the very first time with Tencent at fifth and Netease at ninth.
Additionally, while not in the highest monthly rankings in the publisher category, Papergames’ open-world dress-up adventure Infinity Nikki also found its place as one of the key Chinese-published games that found overwhelming success with its numbers.
"The growing global scale of major Chinese publishers adds a new dynamic to the console and PC gaming markets, and inevitably means added competition in what is already a hyper-competitive industry," Ampere research director Piers Harding-Rolls commented.
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Microsoft was the No.1 games publisher in the world last month
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