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Intrinsic on 20 May 2020
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Angelus said:
only777 said:

MATHS TIME!

So let's compare a made up AAA game.

Game pass has 10 Million users.  Source: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21242004/xbox-game-pass-10-million-subscribers-microsoft-q3-2020-earnings

Let's say 70% is paying full price of $10 a month.  Many users are using the service through $1 deals, etc. This is $70,000,000 per month. so $840,000,000 in a year.

Let's say this Sony sells 10 million copies in a year at $60 a copy. That's $600,000,000‬.

So it looks like Microsoft make more money right? Wrong.

Sony make another AAA game in the same year and that's ANOTHER $600,000,000‬. So now we have $1,200,000,000‬.  Microsoft however are still going to earn $840,000,000 in the year as both their AAA games are included in one price.

Ohhhh, so publishers get 100% of the money on every purchase now do they. Damn, why I didn't I think of that. And of course all those game sales occur at full price as well...nobody buys those on sale ever. Checks out.

Oh... s MS is getting all that money off game pass as profit? Have any idea how much they have to pay publishers of the games on the platform to have the games on there? can you even begin to imagine how much MS would need to pay to say rockstar to have their game on the platform on day 1?

Lets not be talking nonsense here.

Game pass is good, no knock on that, but its a complimentary service and should/would never be a primary service. Games just don't work that way, there is to much money to be made n games primary distribution model for publishers to just piss all that away. Eg. COD on average sells like 15M copies almost every year. Even if using an average price of $40/game, that's $600M in revenue. Every year. How much do you think it would cost MS to have a game like that available on day 1? Now do the same for Maden, Fifa, Cyberpunk, AC... or any other major AAA third-party seller you can imagine. 

MS would be paying as much as $200M in deals per game for some of those AAA games. Does that even remotely sound like a viable business model to you to be the primary form of distribution on any platform???

I'll say it again if MS had the market share or IPs to be pushing games that can on their own sell 10M copies a piece, gamepass wouldn't be being pushed as hard as they are pushing it now.