src said:
Playstation makes $26B a year. Tiil Xbox comes anywhere close (it hasn't, in fact Sony predicts they'll take more marketshare this gen), Sony won't care. Neither will Nintendo.
Gamepass craters software sales. Its unclear if it is even profitable. To be profitable it essentially turns every game in F2P (+ sub cost), where the microtransaction spend by total users has to be greater than the sales revenue they would get by spending $60 to buy the game.
For SP games, that have very little to no MTX, they are subsidised by the MTX revenue of multiplayer games.
I think total PSN revenue is nearing $10B, so pubs from PS alone are getting $30B+ in revenue a year. Good luck trying to achieve that with Gamepass. |
If each PS plus subscriber is paying the full $60.00 a year, and there are 46 million PS plus subscribers year-round, that would make $2.7bn, not $10bn. That's the ballpark number you should be comparing Game Pass revenue to.
In fact, the gross revenue number from PS Plus is $3.5 billion (presumably thanks to those who pay $9.99 monthly), compared with $13.8 billion for software and $7 billion in hardware, to make , as you say, $24.8 billion total sales revenue. These would be the more appropriate numbers to compare to MS's position.
But this is all fluff which is mostly besides the point. Companies will be enticed to either copy or not copy Microsoft's strategy based on net profits and expectations of future net profits. Specifically the present value of all future profits. Nintendo and Sony will presumably have their own estimates about what their net profits would be when either following suit or doubling down on their present strategies, based on how gamers continue to respond to GP and what kind of deals MS are able to start brokering for it. Gamepass is conceived as a disruptive product and has positioned itself as a great value offering on PC as well as console, makes it inherently unpredictable. But it's growing like a rocket, and that's in a market where paying for online multiplayer is becoming increasingly untenable.
So the choice for Sony might be between emulating aspects of game pass or find themselves scrambling to find a subscription service they can pivot PS Plus users onto when that racket eventually runs out of track. It should go without saying though that for Sony, generating half of all PS revenue through software, will protect and grow that revenue as a priority notwithstanding some enormous strategic pressure. Such strategic pressure might, for instance, be a consumer base which is increasingly used to playing games at zero marginal cost. The idea of paying £70 for a new game now baffles me. I wouldn't be so sure as you are that Sony will stay the course as they're a very large and pragmatic corporation which has read the market very well in the past, but this is all change and don't underestimate it.
Another thing is those god-awful graphs, man. Why would you compare Xbox to Prime, Netflix or Spotify. Surely you'd compare Prime, Netflix or Spotify to game pass itself rather than the whole Xbox division including hardware and conventional software sales? Especially when gamepass is quite obviously an exercise in shifting software sales revenue into subscription revenue. It's a super futile comparison.
Join the Prediction League 
