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shikamaru317 said:
Ryuu96 said:

Wise.

Recently Xbox admitted that Game Pass cannibalises sales (which was obviously going to happen at some point) and I'm assuming that some Twitter console warriors are therefore concluding that Game Pass must be bad for developers without knowing the financial agreements between Xbox and said developer, that is what I'm assuming Mike is responding to.

Yeah, these people act like these 3rd party devs are giving their games to Xbox to put onto Gamepass for free, or that Xbox gives the devs only a chump-change payment. That very clearly isn't the case. For instance we heard that Xbox's Gamepass payment for Guardians of the Galaxy was between $5-10m, and that wasn't even a day one Gamepass deal, that came to Gamepass 4 months after release, and considering that Guardians of the Galaxy had fallen as low as $20 per copy at that point, it means that Xbox effectively paid Square Enix for 250-500k lost sales as a result of being on Gamepass. And of course some will have taken advantage of the Gamepass discount to buy copies of the game as well.

I can safely guarantee you that these larger day one Gamepass deal payments are well over the $5-10m for Guardians of the Galaxy, which came 4 months after release. Day one Gamepass deals on big games like Atomic Heart, Wo Long, Back 4 Blood, Sniper Elite 5, and Outriders likely all had payments of $30m or more associated with them, $30m is enough to compensate for around 428k lost sales at a $70 price tag as a result of being on Gamepass. 

That's way too much IMO. Those games are either new IPs or in case of Sniper Elite not necessarily mainstream. The publishers couldn't expect those games to sell 428k units at full price on a single console so I see no reason that MS dishes out that much money. Btw. $30m is almost enough to completely fund those games and in turn make them full Xbox exclusive.