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Microsoft News
Digitaltrends
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Xbox consoles, controllers, and games are about to get more expensive
- Microsoft has announced price increases for Xbox consoles, controllers, and some first-party titles, with potential prices going up to $80 starting this holiday season.
- The price for many console models has increased by at least 20 percent, with the lowest-priced Xbox Series S 512GB model moving from $300 to $380 and the Xbox Series X increasing to $600 from $500.
- Xbox controllers will now start at $65, Xbox Wireless Headset at $120, while the Xbox Adaptive Controller will remain the same price.
- The price increases are global and apply to markets like Europe and Australia; however, no changes have been announced for Xbox Game Pass, and only new titles launching this holiday season will see increased prices.
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Insider
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Image Credit: Insider
AI slowdown? Big Tech earnings are telling a different story.
- Microsoft and Meta reported strong earnings, indicating their continued heavy investments in AI technologies.
- Despite reports of a possible slowdown in AI demand, both companies showed no signs of slowing down their AI investments.
- Microsoft and Meta's increased capital expenditures reflect their commitment to meeting the high demand for AI services from customers.
- Other tech giants like Google also demonstrated strong revenue growth in their AI-focused cloud units, suggesting that the AI trend is still going strong in the tech industry.
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Kotaku
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Image Credit: Kotaku
Microsoft Announces Massive Xbox Console Price Hike, Xbox Games To Cost $80
- Microsoft has announced a significant price increase for Xbox consoles, accessories, and games.
- Console and peripheral prices have risen by a substantial amount starting May 1, with first-party game prices set to reach $80 by the holidays.
- For example, the Xbox Series S 512 price has increased by 27% to $379.99, while the Xbox Series X price has gone up by 20% to $599.99.
- Accessories prices have also increased, such as the Xbox controller going from $60 to $65 and the Elite controller rising from $130 to $150.
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The Verge
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Image Credit: The Verge
Microsoft is raising prices on Xbox consoles, controllers, and games worldwide
- Microsoft is increasing the prices of Xbox Series S / X consoles, controllers, and certain new Xbox games globally.
- The Xbox Series X price is going up by $100 to $599.99, while the Series S will see an $80 increase to $379.99.
- Xbox controllers and headsets are also getting price adjustments, with the base controller now priced at $64.99 and the Xbox wireless headset at $119.99 in the US.
- Some new Xbox games will see a price increase from $69.99 to $79.99 this holiday season, aligning with the pricing of Nintendo's top Switch 2 launch titles.
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VentureBeat
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Image Credit: VentureBeat
Microsoft launches Phi-4-Reasoning-Plus, a small, powerful, open weights reasoning model!
- Microsoft Research has released Phi-4-reasoning-plus, a 14-billion parameter language model designed for tasks requiring deep reasoning.
- The model integrates supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to enhance performance in math, science, and logic-based tasks.
- Phi-4-reasoning-plus is licensed under MIT, compatible with various frameworks, and aims for high-quality reasoning.
- Structured training with special tokens enhances transparency and coherence in problem solving.
- The model balances correctness, conciseness, and formatting consistency through reinforcement learning.
- Phi-4-reasoning-plus is suited for applications requiring high-quality reasoning under memory or latency constraints.
- It supports context lengths up to 64,000 tokens and performs well in chat-like settings.
- Despite its smaller size, the model outperforms larger models on benchmarks like the AIME 2025 math exam.
- Phi-4-reasoning-plus is positioned as a research tool for generative AI systems and not as a universal solution.
- Careful evaluation of performance, safety, and fairness is advised before deploying the model in high-stakes environments.
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Playstationlifestyle
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Microsoft Boasts About PS Store Popularity of Xbox Games
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella boasted about the success of Xbox games on PS Store during a recent earnings call.
- Xbox's multiplatform strategy has led to games reaching over 500 million monthly active users, making Microsoft the top publisher on both Xbox and PlayStation Store.
- Nadella emphasized the importance of cross-platform gaming to sustain Microsoft's gaming business, highlighting the success of Xbox Play Anywhere and cloud gaming on LG TVs.
- The article concludes that Xbox games are on track to become a significant part of the PS Store.
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Psu
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Image Credit: Psu
Microsoft Claims It Was Top Publisher On PS Store During Q1 2025 For Preorders & Preinstalls
- Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, announced during the company's Q3 FY25 earnings call that Xbox was the top publisher on the PlayStation Store for preorders and preinstalls in Q1 2025.
- Gaming revenue increased by 5% year-on-year, driven by Xbox Game Pass, Call of Duty, and Minecraft, while Xbox content and services revenue saw an 8% increase. However, revenue for Xbox hardware declined by 6% compared to the same period last year.
- Microsoft focused on margin expansion and expanding its games to over 500 million monthly active users across devices. PC Game Pass revenue grew over 45% year-over-year, and cloud gaming set a new record, with over 150 million hours played in the quarter.
- Microsoft has embraced a multiplatform strategy by releasing first-party Xbox games on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles. Upcoming releases like Gears of War Collection are rumored to be coming to PS5, following recent releases like Indiana Jones and Forza Horizon 5 on PS5.
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Silicon
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Image Credit: Silicon
Microsoft Profit, Sales Rise Amid Trump Economic Woes
- Microsoft's financial results for the third quarter showed healthy rises in both profits and revenues, driven by cloud growth.
- Despite economic concerns during Donald Trump's first 100 days in office, Microsoft remained relatively immune, with its share price rising by 6 percent in after-hours trading.
- Microsoft's vice chair and President Brad Smith made commitments to European governments, assuring continuity of access to critical technology in Europe.
- For the third quarter ending on 31st March, Microsoft's net profit increased by 18 percent to $25.8 billion, with revenues rising by 13 percent to $70 billion.
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Insider
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Image Credit: Insider
Carrots and sticks: How Google, Microsoft, and Meta are reshaping performance management
- Silicon Valley tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Meta are shifting towards stricter performance management strategies emphasizing rewards and consequences to improve efficiency and productivity.
- Companies like Google are offering more rewards for high performers without increasing the overall budget, while Microsoft is implementing a policy where underperforming employees must either leave voluntarily with a payout or face a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) with strict deadlines.
- Meta has also adopted performance-based culling, aiming to cut around 5% of its lowest-performing workforce annually, reinforcing the shift towards a more intense work environment with consequences for poor performance.
- The broader trend in the tech industry reflects a focus on driving success through intensity and ruthless execution, with performance ratings becoming crucial and the divide between rewards for high performers and consequences for low performers growing starker.
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Analyticsindiamag
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Satya Nadella Explains Why Microsoft Cancelled Data Centre Projects in US and Europe
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned that the company is evaluating demand, workload patterns, and location before committing to data centre projects.
- Nadella emphasized the importance of aligning builds and leases with future workload growth, considering factors like AI workloads and global demand.
- Microsoft CFO Amy Hood noted that these decisions have long lead times, with land acquisition to build-out stretching from five to seven years.
- Despite cancelling some projects, Microsoft continues to aggressively invest in expanding its data centre capacity and plans to increase it in Europe by 40% over the next two years.
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Guardian
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Image Credit: Guardian
China hints at openness to trade talks with US; Tesla denies board search for Musk successor – business live
- Chinese state-controlled social media suggests China is open to trade talks with the US after the White House approached them.
- An account affiliated with CCTV mentioned that the US has reached out to China through multiple channels for discussions on the tariff issue.
- However, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry stated that there have been no consultations or negotiations between China and the US on tariffs.
- Tesla denies rumors about searching for a successor to Elon Musk on its board.
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TechCrunch
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Microsoft’s most capable new Phi 4 AI model rivals the performance of far larger systems
- Microsoft launched new 'open' AI models, with Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus being the most capable ones.
- Phi 4 mini reasoning is trained on 1 million math problems for educational applications on lightweight devices, while Phi 4 reasoning is best for math, science, and coding applications.
- Phi 4 reasoning plus, adapted from Phi 4 model, matches the performance levels of larger models like DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI's o3-mini on certain benchmarks.
- These new models are available on Hugging Face and are designed to balance size and performance for efficient reasoning tasks on resource-limited devices.
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Pymnts
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Image Credit: Pymnts
Microsoft to Continue Building Data Centers as Cloud and AI Lead Growth
- Microsoft to continue investing in capital expenditures throughout fiscal year 2026, with cloud and AI leading revenue gains.
- Intelligent Cloud business saw 21% year-over-year growth, with overall revenue up 13% year over year.
- Microsoft introducing AI agents for various business processes, with over 1 million custom agents created by customers.
- Expecting 20-22% revenue growth in Intelligent Cloud business driven by Azure, with AI capacity constraints expected post-June.
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Siliconangle
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Image Credit: Siliconangle
Microsoft delivers impressive earnings beat, showing strength in AI and cloud
- Microsoft's stock rose over 7% in late trading after beating expectations in its third-quarter financial results driven by cloud growth.
- The company reported earnings of $3.46 per share, exceeding the consensus estimate of $3.22 per share.
- Revenue increased by 13% to $70.07 billion, higher than the analyst's forecast.
- Microsoft anticipates sales between $73.15 billion and $74.25 billion for the current quarter, with Azure cloud business expected to grow by 34% to 35%.
- The company plans to increase capital expenditures in the new fiscal year, focusing on building data centers for AI workloads.
- Azure cloud computing revenue grew 33% in the quarter, driven by increased demand for AI services.
- Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud business, including Azure, saw $26.75 billion in sales, up 21% from a year earlier.
- Microsoft's Productivity and Business unit revenue rose 10% to $29.94 billion, while the More Personal Computing unit sales increased by 6% to $13.37 billion.
- The company is seeing increased commercial traction for Windows 11 as support for Windows 10 is ending.
- Despite the stock's after-hours jump, Microsoft's stock is down around 6% for the year.
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TechCrunch
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Image Credit: TechCrunch
Microsoft expects some AI capacity constraints this quarter
- Microsoft cautioned about potential AI service disruptions due to capacity constraints as demand surpasses data center capabilities.
- The company may face AI capacity constraints as early as June, remaining slightly short in meeting demand by the end of the fiscal year.
- Reports indicate that Microsoft has canceled multiple data center leases this year, despite committing to investing $80 billion into data centers in 2025.
- Microsoft emphasized that future demand for data centers can differ from current demands, as decisions related to data center expansions involve long lead times.
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