XBOX |OT|

[hiccupthehuman]

Zippy6 said:

G2ThaUNiT said:

I’m shocked at the 3% profitability margin. Here Satya and Hood wanted that at 30% lol. Phil and Sarah were clearly in desperation mode.

Massive change was always gonna be coming with the mess Phil left. That’s crazy that Asha even called them out mentioning being in this position from decisions made over the past 5 years.

They invested too much into getting tons of studios, and then put all the games on a subscription. The amount they were spending on creating gamepass content increased exponentially and with that the profit they were getting from each subscriber decreased. They tried to increase gamepass to $30 to fix this and there was a mass exodus of subscribers.

It's hard to make profit when so many of your fanbase are getting all your games so cheap. I stacked Gamepass PC at the beginning of this year for just £7/month. That's only a little more than the price of one game per year. They release just two games I'd purchase in a year and they're getting less money from me and that money has to be shared with other publishers.

How many fans do they have that would be spending $300+ a year just on their first party games? But instead just get gamepass which money needs to be shared with third parties.

I just don't see how they can have a high profit margin while giving away all their games day one on a subscription. Especially a subscription that sees them reportedly spend $1 Billion annually for third party content.

They need to remove day and date for their big first-party titles, there's no other way around it. They lose too much potential revenue. And I think they will. Removing CoD from Game Pass day one is basically an admission that AAA premium game is not commercially viable to be in Game Pass day one.

Now, the logical thinking is: if putting CoD day one in Game Pass is not viable, then surely it is also not viable for Gears of War, Elder Scrolls 6, Halo Next, etc.

This is why I predict they will remove day and date for big first-party titles. They haven't done it yet for upcoming 2026/2027 titles yet, obviously, for a few reasons.

1. At the moment, they lost a lot of subscribers (millions), and now their immediate goal is to increase the number of subscribers back to where they were before.

2. They obviously couldn't remove all big titles from GP day one at once in the same announcement with CoD; that positive PR they got earlier in the year for the price cut would have actually turned into negative PR.

But once they subscribers reach roughly where they were and start plateauing, they'll remove day and date. This is one the things I believe Asha referred with "hard choices ahead".