Xbox |OT|

[shikamaru317]

Barozi said:

shikamaru317 said:

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.

You could be right, $30m may be a bit too high of an estimate, but if GOTG was $5-10m 4 months after release, I'd guess at least $15-20m for some of these  bigger day one Gamepass games. Sniper Elite is also bigger than you think, the first 8 games in the series sold a combined 20m copies (Sniper Elite 1-4 and Zombie Army 1-4, so the 20m figure was before Sniper Elite 5), which averages out to 2.5m sales per game in the series, but the later games sold more than the earlier games did. I sure hope that Xbox compensated them well for Sniper Elite 5, as the day one Gamepass majorly hurt it's Xbox sales, in the UK 92% of it's first week retail copies were on PS4/PS5, compared to just 8% on Xbox One and Xbox Series X. A normal game sells about twice that many retail copies on Xbox in the UK, so day one Gamepass effectively halved it's launch sales on Xbox.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 16 February 2023