Mr Puggsly said:
At this point I feel like the main business on Playstation and Xbox is selling subscriptions. Selling 1st party, 3rd party and subscriptions are all revenue streams though. For Nintendo, they likely get big money selling hardware at a profit and their 1st party games sell best. I assume their subscription service is doing well. Steam in comparison is basically just in the business of software sales. Their hardware efforts failed, SteamOS failed and major PC releases are often skipping Steam. The market has changed. MS losing their market share in Russia isnt a big deal if it was a small market. How many units did they sell there? I would be surprised if its even a 100K. Resources are better spent trying to grow in the west via more/better software and discounts. I know what Phil said about expanding in other markets, but I feel its also a waste of resources. Russia likes PC gaming so Xbox games on PC may attract them. They can even subscribe to Gamepass. If people in Russia have to go to a retailer to get MS subscriptions, well that sucks. But I dont know much about that market and why that is. |
360 was huge and while it most likely sold less than PS3 like in any other European country, it was a close battle I think. In hardcore gaming circles you would get bullied if you had PS3 with its soap cinemas instead of 360. Unfortunately, MS didn't have lots of revenue from these console sales in Russia, because one of the reasons why 360 was so popular was that it was easy to chip and play pirate copies of games. It helped built some brand recognition though. Xbox was the synonym of a gaming console in gen 7. But it all changed this gen. Console market is growing every year, people started buying games. I'm almost sure that Xbox One sold more than 100K as still there are quite a lot of people supporting the brand, but initial failure with proper launch - 1 year after PS4 costed MS a lot. Btw, PS4 sold more than 1m here as far as I know. And what's more disappointing is that MS was up and down in this market throughout the gen - fucked up late launch, then things started getting a bit better with cheaper pricing than PS4, then they fucked up again with the announcement that all games are coming to PC (a heavy blow to your console in PC focused market), then GamePass came in and people started getting interested in Xbox again, because it's cheap gaming, and then once again they just decided to fuck everything up this year by reducing their presence and making their services which worked for more than 10 years without any issues almost unusable and inferior compared to the competition. It's especially disappoiniting because Sony and Nintendo see the value in this market and putting efforts to succeed here. Nintendo came here officially later than MS and already overtook them by quite a lot I guess. because that's what you do if you want to reach as many gamers as possible like Phil Spencer says. You need to put effort in every market possible. Especially if you are already established your brand there.
