Xbox |OT|

[Ryuu96]

JRPGfan said:

Dulfite said:

If they release games on multiple platforms, they can projected much higher profits, which means they can go on a hiring spree to greatly expand studios to speed up production so what you just described doesn't happen.

I think thats the wrong way of looking at it.
The reality is gamepass cant support that many big AAA games, that they can now make, with all the big studios they have.

So they have two options:
A) Drop day-and-date on gamepass. Get xbox users to buy games, and still stay subbed to gamepass. Games can stay exclusive to xbox. Gamble on xbox, hope this turns into better console sales, and thus better game sells and subscriptions ect.

B) keep day-and-date on gamepass. Xbox console users, still get best bang-4-buck service, for games. In order to be able to finance, the losses, doing day-and-date on gamepass for xbox users, port games to PS5/Nintendo, and make them pay for it.

They choose option B)

Some of these studios are huge.
Can you imagine if Call of Duty stayed exclusive to xbox and pc?
The majority of their sales come from playstation.
Dropping playstation would mean 100's of millions of profit, going away, every year (CoD is huge).
And thats just 1 game.

Developement costs are big, and xbox console arn't selling that well.... its likely to end the gen, at like 40m.
With how many studios xbox now has, they need to find a way to not just lose money on keeping them.
(imagine spending $80-100 bn, buying studios, only to be loseing money from it? that wouldn't make sense)

^ this is what made them have to choose, between A and B.

Think this is a reasonable analysis of the situation.

Well, I'm not sure it was entirely to do with Game Pass, I think Microsoft just didn't want to wait for 10 or so years for a "maybe we'll improve our console situation" over the tried and proven profit sources. It is what it is, the CFOs won the battle. COD being exclusive of course like you said would make zero financial sense. AAA costs are too much, the small Xbox install-base. Console exclusivity limits their growth via acquisitions. Their Q1 Xbox hardware projections were ~600k IIRC...That's Wii U levels of bad.

They basically fire sale'd Xbox last holiday and still sold meh and under their expectations. Starfield barely provided a bump. Meanwhile look at how amazing Sea of Thieves for example sells on Steam, Xbox IP are often very strong sellers on Steam so it's not like these games don't have large consumer appeal, it's more than Xbox doesn't. It has hit a ceiling where coupled with the costs of AAA development, it's starting to make more sense to go more multiplatform. At least, that's what I think is happening.

I still think there are ways they could make Xbox hardware an option, and also ways they could garner developer support, but they would require drastic changes to both how Xbox creates their hardware and their entire financial system (I.E...Probably have to cut that 30% for developers down to like 15%) + Make the Xbox Store/Windows Store one unified store, something like making the Xbox hardware basically a PC which runs a Windows Gaming OS with an Xbox UI...Something like that, I'm spit balling ideas here but as I said they'd require huge changes.