Of course it would. Why would I pay 100 bucks for a game that consistently got worse over time past it’s first few months and becomes dead in a year when the new game comes out? If it wasn’t on game pass, I wouldn’t even have bothered.
This is some creative math. So the $20 a month people were then paying for GamePass didn’t amount for anything?
This is why the ex Bethesda guy said GamePass hurts developers. They’re making a killing on GamePass but they aren’t applying those numbers to game sales. Games on GamePass are expected to sell well outside of GamePass, so GamePass literally hurts games on the service. So who wins? Looks like just Microsoft.
Except they don’t win because their poor performance analysis leads them to close the studios that make gamepass worth subscribing to…
It’s unclear if MS is even winning considering they’re trying to hike the price 50%, and considering that Xbox sales are flat.
The article addresses a lot of the speculation about these numbers:
- This is an internal estimate that was leaked to the gaming press, and so is likely designed to be an underestimate, if anything, since it makes the entire XBox division look bad for cannibalizing their own sales (although most likely this was a best estimate).
- A whopping 82% of full-price sales of BO6 was on PS5, the one platform that does not have GamePass
- Inflated piracy numbers are addressed directly by the writer, although no specifics are given in relation to this number since the modeling was not disclosed
So, I think a lot of other commenters are unreasonably dismissing this number as inflated when it’s likely fairly accurate.
The funniest part about this comment is that’s how GAME pass has always worked. They offer it to titles for a lump cash payment in lieu of sales. Now that they own Activision, therefore BOPS6, they care about those lost sales.
When they didn’t make enough software for the last decade for it to be a problem for their bottom line, they didn’t.
But it sure as shit effected literally every game ever on Game Pass. It is and always has been a literal loss leader for every single game on it, they just now give a crap because one of those bigger games is finally theirs.
When Hi-fi rush exploded in popularity, it was because it was discovered on game pass. Where it then went on to be played by millions, while the team behind it made nothing, so Microsoft closed the studio. Literally because the game wasn’t profitable enough after MS decided to force shadow drop it on game pass at launch.
But sure, BOPS6, “lost” them millions on Gamepass and they care about how Gamepass affects the sales of that title.
I’ve never seen a company speed run leaving the console market as fast as Xbox is. Gives me post Dreamcast Sega Vibes.
Future profit of $300M can result in a nice Christmas bonus. Imagine myself on that meeting where everyone is making up numbers until they are big enough.
Subscription > point of sale. It’s way more profitable to be a landlord than a shop keeper. That’s why everything is subscription now.
Especially when you aren’t consistently providing a quality product. If every game is a hit, people will buy them all, but if your games are hit or miss, you keep making revenue regardless.
Only if you can keep people subscribed, the lure of a true perpetual purchase, vs a subscription service is that subscription is a lower fee. But they have to lock you in somehow.
Wait untill you hear about loans and regular interest payments lol.
A more refined method of generating consistent, regular cashflow, rofl.
(Ahem, at least in theory, but then when that stops working, surprise! you get a bailout!)
… But yeah, the natural evolution we should expect is that MSFT (or Hulu or any other sub based service) will soon or at least eventually partner with something like klarna to offer 3-6 month payment loan options … for every recurring monthly subscription payment.
Think about it.
What that means is that… well, if you cancel on month 5, you’re still making payments through month 8, or month 11.
So … should you really go 3 - 6 months paying for not having something?
Or just keep your subscription going?
Loans are literally the OG of ‘dark pattern’, MTX style bullshit, its a perfect match made in hell.
Hypercapitalism, away!!!
I have wondered when they will push to increase minimum subscription duration. Presumably if too many people frequently sub for a single month.
But they lost money
They didn’t mention GamePass income.
There are people out there who basically only play Call of Duty. They’d be paying $360 a year for it.
Don’t forget how much we pay for DLC. Those Blackcell Battle Passes and Beavis & Butthead skins aren’t included with GamePass.
I don’t play it so I wasn’t even thinking of that. Good point!
No they didn’t.
That’s if you’re naive/childish/innocent enough to assume that everyone playing this on game pass would’ve bought it if game pass wasn’t an option.
Same backwards logic to convince useful idiots that each pirated copy is a lost sale.
Not everyone is an innocent child with disneyvision who believes corporations and their employees are there friends.
Even without gamepass, I doubt there would be a significant dent on the total sales % being on playstation consoles, since xbox consoles sold a lot less this gen (30mil vs 80mil | xbox vs ps5)
I feel like this is a piece Microsoft put out there to try to make the price increase feel justified.
I have to imagine they’re around the cut even point with $240/year for gamepass (given that’s four “AAA” games a year). With the price hike to $360/year, they’re assuming the average user would normally buy 6 games per year at full price. I just don’t think that’s the average gamer, but I could be wrong.
Actually remember seeing some numbers on this a while ago and I was pretty shocked at how few games the average person buys. Like median ps3 owner bought 7 games over the life of the entire console.
From looking around google quickly it looks like the average for ps4/5 is 6-10 depending on region.
So if someone stays subscribed to the service for the life of the console then Microsoft comes out way ahead compared to just selling games, I would guess
Yeah, it’s possible that the group who would buy gamepass arent the norm and they’d normally buy 10+ games. But even then, they’d have to be buying 10+ games a year within the gamepass library to be canabilizing sales.
Either way, they picked a really bad time given the state of the world to be raising prices by 50%.
I’m not average I’m sure, but I buy 0 games a year at full price 😅
Same. Benefits of being a patient gamer. Dozens of games for the price of full priced games. Hardware costs less too, since I don’t need the latest and greatest being couple years behind triple a titles people are playing now.
deny the parasite profit is the only language they understand.
i wish more people knew how to do that.
But lost sales for Black Ops was calculated from the beginning. The idea was in exchange the Game Pass subscriptions would go up. Nothing revolutionary here.
Also all this shitty mtx they pushed front and center in the game.
Me and my buddy got gamepass for a month to try BO6 on our PCs. We didn’t end up keeping it after that (we just don’t care about newer cods that much), but there’s no way we would have tried the game otherwise for the 70$ to actually purchase it.
Ain’t no way I was gonna be buying BO7 on launch until I played it and made sure it was decently optimized. I’ve been baited too often by games running/being fine during beta/open access only for it to be a completely different story on launch day.
I was going to get it via Game Pass for the first month before, now that they lost sales I definitely will be lol
Isn’t this something everyone should do with every game? No pre-order, wait until reviews are out. If not really needed, then wait until patches are out, maybe with a small or big sale on the game price too. Almost all AAA games launch broken or unoptimized.
Pre-orders are bad for players and bad for devs. They’re only good for publishers.
Good. Fuck Microsoft.
This isn’t the “good, this will fuck up Microsoft” you’re looking for…They are perfectly fine with people paying through subscriptions instead of sales.
