shikamaru317 8 hours ago
Without knowing the exact costs associated with Gamepass or Gears E-Day development, it is impossible for any of us, industry analyst or layman, to ever know if it's doing well enough to be considered a success. We would need:
- The exact budget figure for the Gears E-Day itself, development and marketing, and not including costs associated with The Coalition making toolsets multiple 1st and 2nd party games will benefit from (because those costs would be spread out over the budgets for multiple upcoming games that use the toolsets), or the costs of assisting other Xbox studios with development the last 7 years since Gears 5 released
- An exact number of current Gamepass subscribers and a breakdown of how many subs are on each price tier, PC, Essential, Premium, and Ultimate, in order to work out the monthly revenue of Gamepass, and especially the revenue from the PC and Ultimate tiers, which are the only tiers with day one 1st and 2nd party releases now
- An exact figure for the upkeep of running Gamepass, server electricity costs and such, pay for employees in the Gamepass division, in order to subtract costs from the yearly revenue figure
- A figure for how much money Xbox spends on 3rd party Gamepass deals each year, to subtract those costs from the Gamepass revenue figure.
- An internal Xbox estimate of how many more copies of Gears E-Day Xbox believes they would have sold if there was no day one Gamepass Ultimate or PC Gamepass release
- How many new subscribers Gears E-Day drew to PC Gamepass and Gamepass Ultimate, and how many months they stay subbed into the future
It's nowhere near as cut and dry to determine a games success on a subscription model than it is on a purely sales model, because there are so many factors.
