I'm not sure why that would be surprising. There are 34 million Game Pass subscribers who can play the game for "free," compared to on PS5 or PS4 where the game needs to be purchased.

Partially because that'd be assuming most of the 34 million GP subs would be playing MLB, which is highly unlikely, but also surprising when compared to the combined effort of XOne/Series roughly 80 million combined consoles against the PS4/PS5's roughly 170 million combined consoles lol. 

I didn't realize that TrueTrophies had a larger user base than TrueAchievements, I always assumed that the two couldn't be properly compared because TrueAchievements had alot more users as the older site of the two, I always assumed most Playstation users used other Trophy sites like playstationtrophies.org rather than TrueTrophies. According to that, they had a 3m player sample size for their Playstation most played chart and only 2.4m player sample size for their Xbox most played chart, so TrueTrophies actually has more users than TrueAchievements.

Impressive how well MLB did on Xbox, 6x more players is insane, that means that day one Gamepass not only overcame the Playstation install base being more than 2x the size of the Xbox install base, but also the fact that MLB is Sony 1st party, and it overcame both disadvantages by 6x. 

Received today!

And totally unrelated, my Grandmother will finally be old enough to drink alcohol this month.  She was born in 1940 February 29th.  Gonna get her one of those miniature bottles of tequila for display on her shelf.  And cash.  

Cloud adoption and expansion had been slow, but is finally picking up, Spencer said. Gaming via the cloud now accounts for a double-digit percentage of total hours of Xbox games played, he noted. "There was a time when we weren't deploying more [server] blades because we had more supply than we did demand for the server racks that we had in place," he said. "That's clearly not true today."

Last June, Xbox executives testified during a hearing regarding the Microsoft-Activision deal that Xbox cloud gaming had mostly been used by console gamers to try games without downloading them (meaning it wasn't significantly expanding the market). "Any conversation we have on cloud is very time-dependent because it's growing so fast," Spencer said.

Xbox cloud gaming growth in the last six months, he said, has been "in markets that are never going to be console markets," and has been spreading across TVs, Chromebooks and Android tablets.

As for the Series S, Spencer told me in 2020 that he expected it to outsell the more expensive Series X lifetime. He told me last week that he still expects that to be the case.

Microsoft's Phil Spencer on Xbox growth, job cuts and the future of discs (gamefile.news)

Gaming via the cloud now accounts for a double-digit percentage of total hours of Xbox games played, he noted.

Even if this is just 10%, I'm very surprised.

Microsoft has yet to say when Call of Duty will be added to its Game Pass subscription service, but the flagship Activision Blizzard franchise is still coming, Phil Spencer tells me.

"Our intent is the full portfolio of games from ZeniMax, Activision Blizzard and XGS—Xbox Game Studios—will be on Game Pass, day one," he said. (Day one = when they also go on sale.)

Spencer said there is development work to be done to get Game Pass launches going for the Activision Blizzard games. "We're doing the back end work to make them come to PC and console simultaneously," he said.

Spencer wouldn’t talk to me last week about that leaked all-digital Series X, but said Microsoft will “follow what the customers are doing.”

“We are supportive of physical media, but we don't have a need to drive that disproportionate to customer demand,” he told me.

“We ship games physically and digitally, and we're really just following what the customers are doing. And I think our job in running Xbox is to deliver on the things that a majority of the customers want. And right now, a majority of our customers are buying games digitally.”

When I pressed if Microsoft would release a console without a disc drive, he pointed out the company had already done that with the Series S. (I walked into that one, folks. Sorry!)

He also hinted at some economic concerns. “Gaming consoles themselves have kind of become the last consumer electronic device that has a drive,” he said. “And this is a real issue, just in terms of the number of manufacturers that are actually building drives and the cost associated with those. And when you think about cogs that we're going to go put in a console—and as you have fewer suppliers and fewer buyers—the cost of the drive does have an impact.

“But I will say our strategy does not hinge on people moving all-digital,” he said. “And getting rid of physical, that's not a strategic thing for us.”

As for the reporting that Microsoft had laid off people on teams involved in making disc versions of games, Spencer said that was more about “alignment of our teams across ZeniMax, Activision and Xbox. So we have teams that are in charge of physical retail, inclusive of selling games in physical outlets. So that's what the team action was. It wasn't about us getting rid of the capability.”

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When you put it that way, I.E. Gaming consoles are among the last electronic devices with a drive, so that increases the price of manufacturing the drives because they're less desired now, it drives up the price of the console, so the only financially logical solution to that would be to release digital only consoles in the future but with an optional disc drive, drive the price down for everyone but keep the drive option for those that want it.

Ok xbot, but how much they make from them $1 subs.Kappa.