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Azzanation on 21 July 2020
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V-r0cK said:
Azzanation said:

If someone goes through the effort to download 50+gigs of a game, it shows interest.

Whats the difference if i go into a store, buy a game, play it for 1 day, than return it the next day.. that purchase still counts as a sale. The exact same issue happens with actual purchases for decades.

Phyiscal sales arent entirely accurate either.

If people download a 50gb game yes it shows interest, but if its free, is that really something big to boast about?  That's why its bigger news when you hear how much money these free-to-play games make rather than the amount of downloads.  If you think about all the free-to-play games, games like Fortnite tells you how much money they make yoy because that's something to boast about, while other free-to-play games just mention how many times its been installed just to sound good.  

Bolded: The difference is as I mentioned earlier if you bought a game that counts as a sales number and that is the most accurate in terms of throwing numbers around.  And with money involved it's about as accurate as it gets whether you bought it then return it because money is at play and you can't lie about that.

You can get an accurate amount of how much money a game has made, how many it sold (or returned), how many times it's downloaded, as that's all recorded via transaction of sorts, but how do you measure the term 'being played'? For the example of Sea of Thieves, for all we know Rare/MS would consider the moment you starting the game once they already counted as 'being played'.  Who knows but that's all I'm curious about and would like to know what's the standard to be considered as 'being played'.  

If you really look at it closely, its all the same thing. 

Example:

GAMEPASS - 1m people downloaded the game

RETAIL - 1m people brought the game 

GAMEPASS - 200k people uninstalled the game 

RETAIL - 200k people returned thier game

Same results.

If someone is willing to download a big game like SoTs, it shows interests, no different if someone went to the store to buy a game, it shows interests. 

Weather the player decides to uninstall the game after playing 5mins of SoTs is no different to if someone asked for a full refund at a store, thier is no profit with refunds except with GamePass, MS still make money off the subscription model.

Different story if you could play SoTs instantly without downloading it but that's not the case here, effort must be made to play it, until Azure Streaming becomes a thing.