With Microsoft releasing new financial data and statistics around the performance of its gaming division in the second quarter of the fiscal year 2021, everything sounds like a huge success for Xbox since the launch of Series X and Series S. According to Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, the number of Xbox Game Pass subscribers has reached 18 million in Q2 2021, which is an outstanding hit for the service.

Originally launched back in 2017 with a limited number of games and without supporting any other services like Xbox Live Gold, xCloud, and EA Play, Microsoft kept supporting Xbox Game Pass with quality-of-life improvements and very reasonable pricing. In over three years, now Game Pass is home to a lot of first-party and third-party games and services. Along with expanding its content, Microsoft has succeeded in growing the community of the service as well. Six million average subscribers per year is surely a big number for one of the most successful gaming subscription services.

On the other hand, Nadella also revealed that the Xbox Live service hit 100 million monthly active users, which again sounds like a new record for the online service. Recently, Microsoft officially announced that they will allow Xbox players to play free-to-play online multiplayer games like Fortnite with no need for an Xbox Live subscription.

Other statistics of the financial report reveals that Microsoft's revenue from the gaming division hit $5 billion, which is the highest-ever revenue for a quarter from Xbox. It's worth noting that $2 billion of the revenue was raised from third-party game sales.

As we covered earlier, an initial report from Microsoft's financial performance in the second quarter of the fiscal year 2021 revealed that the hardware revenue of Xbox has been increased by 86% thanks to the launch of Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S earlier in November last year.