A new industry report demonstrates that spending a lot of money on advertising doesn’t guarantee people will play the games they’re promoting.
With the recent leadership changes within Xbox, it’s clear Microsoft thinks the gaming division is in need of a shake-up, especially when 2025 was far from a banner year for the company.
According to Microsoft, none of Xbox’s first party releases during the last quarter of the year met financial expectations, with gaming revenue still dropping compared to the year before.
That seems even worse when a new report states that Microsoft spent more on advertising campaigns for its games last year than any other company and yet is still in enough trouble to need a complete exec refresh.
Microsoft spent more on Xbox ads last year than any other publisher
The new State of Gaming report by Sensor Tower reveals that Microsoft spent almost $160 million (about £118 million) on advertising, but very few of its new releases were amongst the most downloaded games of the year.
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The only wholly new game that ranks among the year’s top performers was Doom: The Dark Ages and even then it was on the lower end of the scale, at about five million downloads.
Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7’s position is nebulous since Sensor Tower only lists Call Of Duty as a whole, so it’s unclear how many of those 9.5 million downloads were for the new game or one of the older entries.
By comparison, EA spent under $80 million (about £59 million) on advertising and became the top publisher of 2025 on console and PC, mostly thanks to the success of Battlefield 6 and its regular sports titles.
When mobile is taken into consideration, though, Embracer Group beat both Microsoft and EA in terms of game downloads. The vast majority of Embracer’s downloads come from mobile games, with 498.4 million downloads compared to only 22.7 million across console and PC.
Sensor Tower makes note that Tencent, which ranks fifth overall, should really be at the top, since data from mobile subsidiaries Supercell and Miniclip isn’t included.
If there’s one thing to take away from this, it’s that spending a lot of money on advertising doesn’t guarantee success. Frankly, Xbox’s messaging has been awfully confusing over the past few years, pivoting to multiplatform releases and pumping out ads about why you don’t need an Xbox console, while still promising new Xbox hardware.
The ‘This is an Xbox’ campaign was reportedly unpopular even within the company, but it remains to be seen if Microsoft’s messaging will become any less muddy going forward. Especially when new Xbox boss Asha Sharma has said ‘the plan’s the plan until it’s not the plan.’
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There’s a lot of other industry factoids and statistics throughout the report, but one that caught our eye was that mobile gaming revenue has fallen flat, only growing by a measly 1% compared to the year before.
Meanwhile, PC and console revenue rose by 13%, with the report concluding that mobile gaming has entered a ‘mature phase’ and will focus more on player retention and monetisation – basically prioritise making money out of existing players rather than attracting new ones.
The report adds, ‘2025 proved the strength of the PC/console ecosystem, fuelled by viral indie hits, high-quality AA experiences, and reliable AAA pipelines – anchored by the year’s top-selling title, Battlefield 6.’
One interpretation of this is that more people are turning to traditional PC and console gaming over mobile gaming, which has been a trend for a few years now and one of the main reasons Chinese developers have recently turned to console gaming, with titles like Black Myth: Wukong.
But as another report pointed out, traditional gaming still isn’t growing enough to appease executives, especially when other forms of interactive entertainment, like gambling and AI chatbots, are seeing more investment.
Plus, even if more people are starting to play PC and console games, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get involved when hardware is growing more expensive due to the ongoing memory crisis.
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