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.
Subscription > point of sale. It’s way more profitable to be a landlord than a shop keeper. That’s why everything is subscription now.
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.
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!
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.
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 $360/year, they’re assuming the average user would normally buy 6 games per year at full price. I just don’t think that’s the average gamer, but I could be wrong.
Actually remember seeing some numbers on this a while ago and I was pretty shocked at how few games the average person buys. Like median ps3 owner bought 7 games over the life of the entire console.
From looking around google quickly it looks like the average for ps4/5 is 6-10 depending on region.
So if someone stays subscribed to the service for the life of the console then Microsoft comes out way ahead compared to just selling games, I would guess
Yeah, it’s possible that the group who would buy gamepass arent the norm and they’d normally buy 10+ games. But even then, they’d have to be buying 10+ games a year within the gamepass library to be canabilizing sales.
Either way, they picked a really bad time given the state of the world to be raising prices by 50%.
Me and my buddy got gamepass for a month to try BO6 on our PCs. We didn’t end up keeping it after that (we just don’t care about newer cods that much), but there’s no way we would have tried the game otherwise for the 70$ to actually purchase it.
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.
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.
