By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Immersiveunreality on 20 September 2020
Edit Thread
padib said:
Intrinsic said:

That's all well and good. But this is the quality of quantity argument all over again.

Some dev costs of games you know:

  1. GTA5 $137M
  2. GOW $44M
  3. HZD $47M
  4. Shadow of the Tomb Raider $75M

I really could keep going. This information is all out there for all that want to see it. And all those prices are before you tack on the marketing costs. Which in some cases actually costs more than what it costs to make the darn things.Eg.GTA5 with marketing costs over $260M. Yu can tack on another $30 - $40million at least for every AAA game marketing cost to the list above.

The simple fact is, it does cost around $80M - $120Mon average to make AAA games these days. And those posts will go up a bit next-gen as they always do.

Why is this important? This is exactly why you will not see those kinda games on Gamepass on day 1. You may see them there eventually when the game is considered to be at the end of its term, but not in the first 12 months.

And this is a simple math problem, MS simply cannot afford the cost of admission to have these kind games be on their service on launch day. Take COD for instance. This is a game that across all platforms sells at least 15M copies in its first 6 months on the market. That's $900M of revenue in just under months. Not including extras like limited editions and all MTX. For MS to secure games like those, they would have to pay out well over $500M. And that just for that year, and just that one game. Then spread this out to say 4 or 5 other such games in a year. Now granted not all of them is COD, so they may get away with paying "only" like $350M for others. We are talking billions a year just to secure the titles that are coming to the platform that year.

And why do they pay that you ask? Well just take you for instance, if you know you c get COD, Cyberpunk...etc on day one on GP, would you still go out and buy them for $70? Would anyone? Hell, if MS announces tomorrow they have games like cyberpunk the next GTA, AC, COD...etc on their service I would cancer my PS5 pre-order in a heartbeat.

It's just not sustainable. Not for anyone that knows they can move the games direct to consumers at full price. Ever wondered why FIFA (or at least the latest one) isn't on GP?

It's really easy math to see how the model works. With 50M xboxes sold on average per gen, and gamepass now accessing windows audiences as well as android, the base can be up to 100M subscribers per month. Now multiply that by 10$. That's 1B dollars per month coming in. With that kind of money, they can finance altogether 10, top, AAA high-budget games all by themselves if they needed to moneyhat.

There's no danger here, plus Sony sell games outside of PS Now in a more agressive way, so 3rd parties are saved.

If Microsoft takes as much as Apple or Steam it is 30 percent and otherwise between 10 and 20 percent of the amount you speak off and even that aint pure profit as they have to constantly invest to keep up their own services and salaries,marketing,taxes.(could easily take up close to half or even over half off the revenue they get out of the subscription)

We can assume that it will not be wise to invest as wildly in AAA games as you said.

Last edited by Immersiveunreality - on 20 September 2020