Despite the expectations that UK CMA will be a major victory for Microsoft and its journey to be able to legally acquire Activision Blizzard, the tech giant from Redmond has published its Q3 2023 earnings and things are not looking good, even for Xbox.

Despite having a positive revenue and income, respectively of $52.9 billion (7% up from last year) and $18.3 billion (9% up), Microsoft could not capitalize entirely.

Decomposing numbers, we got Windows and devices revenue, which includes OEM licensing for prebuilt computers with Windows, fell 27% and yet this is another evidence that the pandemic boom of PC has indeed, over.

Microsoft branded hardware, including HoloLens, Surface and Microsoft-branded equipment also went down 30% year over year.

Pretty much positive in this earnings are Office and Azure, with cloud services revenue grew 17 percent, with Azure revenue up 27 percent. Microsoft says this growth was driven by “strong demand for our consumption-based services.”

Microsoft 365 Consumer subscribers grew 12 percent this quarter up to 65.4 million subscribers. That’s also an increase on the 63.2 million Microsoft reported last quarter, boosted by the newest Microsoft 365 tier for budget users at $1.99 per month.

Finally, Xbox numbers are interesting, while Xbox as a business is in negative, Game Pass is the only metric in positive as it is counted on the Xbox content and services revenue which is up 3%, but Xbox hardware is 30% and added to the mix that Microsoft acknowledged that sold less Xbox Series S and X console than expected this past holiday season.