Well, I can bet my head that the Halo campaign will give you more hours of play time than plenty of games out there that cost you $70.  And about the multiplayer, I can bet you that millions of people will have fun with it for hundreds of hours, which cannot be said about some $70 games out there. Oh, and you realize that you do not need GP to play Halo Infinite, right?

Tbf to Netflix, their focus has always been TV-Shows more than movies while Disney is a movie studio first, Netflix has only fairly recently started to delve into big production movies and that's likely only because every movie company is now making their own streaming service so Netflix can no longer as easily get certain films into their service after their cinema release.

I think TV will continue to be their main focus and rightfully so, it simply makes more sense for them, while Disney and other companies will likely go back to timed Cinema exclusivity releases and stop doing day one launches into their streaming service after Covid is mostly dealt with.

I don't really care for the movie content anyway, I'm a TV Show guy now for the most part, Lol.

1. Do you really think that the majority of Bethesda fans on PS won't buy a cheap Series S later in the generation or a low end gaming PC, or at least subscribe to Gamepass temporarily for xCloud play of Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6, Doom 3, etc.? I think you underestimate how fanatical Bethesda's fanbase is. As for your Halo 5 vs Halo 3 comparison, Halo 5 was down somewhat compared to Halo 3 at launch, but not quite as bad as your numbers make it seem, as digital sales on console had increased substantially between 2007 and 2015, and NPD wasn't tracking digital sales yet in 2015. While initial sales for Halo 5 were definitely lower than the Xbox 360 Halo games, Halo 5 had good legs, Michael Pachter claimed that a Microsoft representative told him that Halo 5's lifetime sales were comparable to the lifetime sales of Halo 3, Halo 4, and Halo Reach, he implied lifetime Halo 5 sales were over 10m. And so far Halo Infinite is looking like it will be a bigger success than Halo 5, especially since the multiplayer is F2P while the singleplayer will be on Gamepass.

2. I suspect more people play MLB The Show and other sports games in singleplayer than multiplayer. And I already disproved your point because we have big singleplayer or singleplayer/co-op games day and date on Gamepass, like Back 4 Blood, Outriders, and STALKER 2. 

3. Depends on the game. Some are pretty cheap freebies, like the free weapon charm in Apex Legends currently, but the value of some of those free Gamepass microtransactions for F2P games adds up quite alot. For instance one F2P battle royale game, Spellbreak, has been getting it's season passes completely for free on Gamepass so far. Phantasy Star Online 2 is getting monthly free Gamepass microtransactions which include XP boosters and currency since the game released on Xbox I believe. MLB The Show 21 currently has 7 free summer packs which give you a total of 29 items. Splitgate currently has a free Gamepass pack which gives you a character skin and 3 weapon skins. Rogue Company currently has a free character, a free skin, and 20k XP. World of Warships currently has 2 free ships on Gamepass. If you play at least 1 of the F2P games that Gamepass has free perks for on any given month, it would offset a good bit of the $10 cost for that month of Gamepass.

Yeah in my initial post I said that Netflix does amazing TV series. But I feel that the comparison does not fit as well as movies. 

Ultimately the subscription model has its limits, even for the biggest service like Netflix. If gaming companies are going to continue to push out AAA or AAAA games in a decent amount of time, I don't see how its sustainable for the subscription model to fund it.

That being said, not having a compelling gaming subscription service is also not feasible in the current climate.

What I wonder is how do you come by your numbers.  In other words you say its not sustainable but where are you getting the numbers to back it up.  Do you believe that all these companies going to sub models are just doing it for the fun of it.  Its not like MS does not know about the sub model, how it works and the profit margins since they sell multiple sub models with their products.  When gamers say they do not see how something will work is more to the point that they have no clue about the business and then rely on bias to front their opinion.  I have worked in multiple big business that do sub models and I can tell you that MS as a company would not put the whole company behind GP if the model was not sustainable.  

1. Not at all. The avg gamer on PS buys 2 games a year. If they can't find Fallout they'll just buy another of the dozen or so games. Lower is an understatement. In the UK and US, it was down by almost 60-70%. Halo 3 sold 3.3 million in 12 days compared to Halo 5's 935-1.2M in 1 month in the US.

Giving a game away for free does not make it a success. A F2P game's success depends on the number of MAU over the years and avg user spend. We'll see if a F2P Halo can survive in a multiplayer world that has largely moved on.

Twitch Monthly Peak Sept 2021:

• Fortnite - 1,300,000
• COD - 350,000
• Apex - 330,000
• Halo - 72,000

2. No you did not. None of those games are big IPs, and it just proved my point. I'm talking about the Witchers, ACs, Star Wars, FFs, Batmans, REs, Souls of the world, big SP IPs that sell close to 10M and higher.

3. The way that business model works is by bundling its only a save if you play multiple of those games, which may only apply to a minority. Its also telling that the big three, Fortnite, Apex, Warzone are missing.

Lol okay. How about we wait for Halo Infinite to release and see those instead throwing out twitch numbers for 5+ year old Halo games. 

So Game Pass needs day 1 releases of some of the largest IP's in the industry to be successful? Lol How many new movies/tv shows come to Netflix that aren't published by them? Oh right, none. While Game Pass gets day 1 releases constantly from 3rd party games ranging from A-AAA. 

Apex has bundles in Game Pass. Fortnite and Warzone currently don't but that could change. Really weird thing to get nitpicky about, but not surprising considering how high your expectations are for this service that is handily the best deal in gaming. 

1. The average casual gamer maybe, but we're talking core gamers here. Bethesda has one of the most dedicated fanbases of any game publisher, and Bethesda Game Studios one of the most dedicated fanbases of any game developer. There is a reason why, despite being a smaller publisher, Bethesda was able to put on an E3 show just about every year this past gen (when other, larger publishers, often skipped E3) and still got huge numbers of views on their E3 showcase. There is a reason why games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim sold huge numbers both at launch and lifetime. There is a reason why Starfield is already at the top of many gamers most anticipated lists, and why it has a good chance of taking the most anticipated 2022 award at the 2021 Game Awards in December.

Again, you are ignoring the rise of console digital sales between 2007 and 2015. Physical sales were down by 60-70%, but digital sales for Halo 5 weren't tracked, and the console digital market increased from less than 5% of console software sales in 2007 up to around 30-35% of console software sales by 2015, meaning that overall, Halo 5 sales were likely only down by around 40-50% compared to the 360 Halo games at launch, which is understandable considering all of the factors that Xbox One had going against it last gen. And like I said, lifetime sales for Halo 5 seemed to be comparable to the 360 Halo games, even if launch sales were down. 

2. So you mean huge AAA IP's rather than just AAA IP's then. Well, I agree that MS is unlikely to hat day one Gamepass for your Witchers and your GTA's and your Assassin's Creeds, but then again, never say never, because they have already been getting day one gamepass on somewhat smaller 3rd party AAA games, if Gamepass keeps growing MS might be willing to pay for larger and larger day one AAA hat deals to keep growth strong. And besides, MS already has day one gamepass on 2 games in that 10m+ selling IP sales tier, Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6, since they are 1st party now. Also there have been rumors that MS might have a Star Wars exclusive of their own, coming from Zenimax Online Entertainment. Then there is Indiana Jones, which while not as big as Star Wars, is still a pretty huge IP, with Indiana Jones 4 pulling in $790m at the box office, and Indiana Jones 5 likely to break the $1b box office barrier in 2022.

3. Apex technically isn't missing, they just do smaller cosmetics as gamepass perks, so far at least. I wouldn't be surprised to see MS go for gamepass perks on Fornite and Warzone in the future though.

L M A O

those are the numbers for Halo Infinite. We'll see how it performs when it fully releases.

Halo 5 had an all time peak viewership of 120k.....

What do you think a sustainable price is subscription wise? Considering Microsoft 365 starts at 9.99 per user per month for just a couple web app versions.

The worries are that the continued undervaluing of games, in order to acquire more subs, will hurt the industry in the long run. It's a race to the bottom which is never good.

Either the sub price goes up, or the service grows to hundreds of millions of people. There is still a big cost to running xCloud, yet the higher the user base, the more optimized it can be. And there will be plenty 'low cost' people that run all on their own hardware.

However if it grows that huge, the next worry is, how will it change gaming. Just like retaining users to a subscription service, games will want to retain their players to get a bigger piece of the subscription money pie. Which might mean more grinding and/or pay to win which ftp games are plagued with. Plus if it grows that huge, competition will want a piece of the pie as well with the risk games get locked behind different subscription services just as what happened to tv.

Yes, the model can be sustainable. Atm, the way it is laid out at the current pricing, it is not. So what is needed subscription number vs price wise to get to a healthy sustainable model that puts out regular new content.