| VersusEvil said: Game Pass is goated, only reason I came back to Xbox at the end of 2019 and made Xbox my main platform since the early Xbox 360 days. |
I can see both sides here. Obviously I love Gamepass on a personal level, I've used the hell out of it over the 5 years or so that I've been subbed, it is the best deal in all of gaming by quite some considerable margin, over 400 games for $11 a month, and you can even avoid paying anything if you make good use of Microsoft Rewards. However, at the same time, I can also see why there are insiders and industry analysts saying that Gamepass contributed to Xbox's current issues. Fact is, day one 1st and 2nd party games and these day one 3rd party deals are costing them alot of money, obviously the 3rd party day one deals are costing them money as they have to pay those developers and publishers either a lump sum or some kind of sliding scale payment based on the number of gamepass downloads, but putting 1st and 2nd party games on there day one is obviously going to cost them alot of full priced sales in the launch period and months beyond. How many are out there buying Xbox 1st and 2nd party games since they all became day one Gamepass, and how many are buying them at full price (minus the 10% Gamepass discount)? Personally, I haven't bought a single one, I've bought some DLC like the Starfield one and some microtransaction money for Halo Infinite, but I haven't bought a single Xbox 1st or 2nd party game since 2019, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. That is going to be alot of money lost, and while that was ok when the Gamepass sub base was growing rapidly, that growth has slowed considerably now, Gamepass has gone from growing several million subs each quarter to reportedly only growing 5m in the 18 months between January 2022 and September 2023, and Starfield reportedly didn't generate as many subs as they wanted, only increasing subs from "over 30m" in September 2023 to 34m in February 2024.
Now that the Microsoft Gaming division is under increased scrutiny by the Microsoft board of directors, in the wake of the $70b ABK acquisition, the board is going to have the the Chief Financial Officers like Tim Stuart and Amy Hood going over Microsoft gaming's financials with a fine toothed comb, looking for ways to maximize the division's profitability and pay back that $70b asap. And all of this money lost to day one Gamepass games is going to be glaring at the CFO's like it's written in highlighter. Since Gamepass subs aren't meeting growth targets, the CFO's are very likely going to be looking at two different ways to improve the gaming division's revenue moving forward, the first being a series of Gamepass price hikes over the coming months and years (aka the Netflix strategy), the other being the ending of the day one Gamepass releases for 1st and 2nd party games, with those games instead landing on Gamepass sometime after release, be it 6 months, 9 months, a year, in the hopes that such a move results in a considerable increase in full priced sales for those 1st and 2nd party games. I don't know which path they will choose, but I highly doubt Gamepass will be the same as it is right now by the end of this year.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 11 May 2024
