Xbox |OT|

[EpicRandy]

Ryuu96 said:

My highlights from the EC (European Commission) decision (256 pages).

This is PART 1, I'll try to have the rest during the weekend.

MS expects to reach (part) of the famous 3 billion consumers by 2030 (page 9)

Gaming is a highly dynamic industry, and the fastest growing portion of the media and entertainment sector. It is larger than pay-TV, home video (including streaming), cinema, music, books or newspapers & magazines. Today, 3 billion consumers around the world play games, a number that the Notifying Party expects to reach [REDACTED] by 2030. Gamers are able to access and play thousands of highly differentiated games on a variety of devices, including PCs, gaming consoles, and mobile devices.

I once stated MS is going for 200m+ game pass subscribers in the long term and got kind of laughed at lol. The thing is Gamepass subscribers should mainly grow gen over gen and not suffer from a hard reset like solely console gaming. I believe their plans got deeply disturbed (slowed down )by Covid especially when it comes to the production capacity and pricing of Series S for specific markets.

Ryuu96 said:

Originally, it looks like MS thought about releasing xCloud through white-label services (page 11, footnote 18 about white-label services)

Prior to the launch of cloud game streaming, Microsoft considered the possibility of [business secrets concerning business strategy]. This would entail [business secrets concerning Microsoft XCloud strategy]. Microsoft has had preliminary discussions with [business secrets concerning business strategy]. Microsoft offers publishers the option to appear as channels within Game Pass (e.g., EA Play). Further investment would be required in order for Microsoft to be able to offer white-label services to third parties from a technical perspective.

Well well looks like MS actually evaluated this scenario.

Ryuu96 said:

[...]

That's a lot to digest at once and I can't seem to get my focus straight right now. But funny to see all those "Microsoft is a small player..." that would for sure have triggered many users here on this site if it was released back in May or June.

Also nice to see a more in-depth look at EC views on cloud streaming and where its boundaries are, it seems to be pretty much in line with what I thought and highlights that their SLC of the cloud Market was vastly different in nature than the CMA one despite having the title. There was no confusion by mixing in other markets and future variation in monetization schemes like the CMA had.