Tech giant Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) slipped fractionally in the closing minutes of Monday’s trading session, which comes at an odd time for the company. It just had a major winner of a weekend for sales of one game on the Xbox platform, “Palworld.” Despite massive sales, some bugs and certification problems may be giving Microsoft a few fits.
Unquestionably, “Palworld” is a major hit for Microsoft right now. Showing up on both Steam and the Xbox games store, “Palworld” puts players in a world full of creatures to tame and adventures to carry out. The creatures in question have been frequently compared to characters from “Pokemon” on more than one occasion, with the key difference that they can be armed. And heavily, in some cases.
But there’s no denying it’s a hit, as Microsoft saw over five million copies of “Palworld” get sold in the first weekend it was available. Just to underscore that this was more than a Microsoft phenomenon, “Palworld” also hit the fifth-highest peak concurrent player count of all time, coming in with a high-water mark of 1,291,967 players at once. Right now, it is the most-played game on Steam.
Certification Troubles May Bite Microsoft
This may have been a huge launch for Microsoft, by most accounts, but it didn’t come without problems. Some have noted that the PC version of “Palworld” and the Xbox version look quite different from each other, with several features missing in the Xbox version. This, notes developer Pocketpair, is largely due to Microsoft’s certification process, or the process by which games make it to the Xbox ecosystem. Pocketpair notes that Microsoft players aren’t playing an “older” version but rather a “different” one. Still, a “different” version with fewer features might not be taken so well by gamers, and that could ultimately hurt Microsoft down the line, at least somewhat.
Is Microsoft Stock a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on MSFT stock based on 36 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 65.13% rally in its share price over the past year, the average MSFT price target of $433.18 per share implies 9.12% upside potential.
