Game Pass topped 34 million in early 2024. That was before the first Call of Duty game was day and date on the service. It most likely grew more from that point, but I am thinking it never hit 40 million as I am sure they would have announced that number. 34 million was the last time we got an actual number. So who knows where it stands now. The positive is there is growth once again now that they lowered the price for the Ultimate and PC tiers. 

Oh yes you are right that he is talking profit margin. My bad on that. I am not sure the difference between that and accountability margin. 

Yeah, you'd think Xbox going multiplat with all their first party releases would've been raking in money. It's been anything but.

'This is an Xbox' => Cool we don't need an Xbox anymore, so I can buy that xbox game on a competitor's platform => Only once $$$ for Xbox.

While that cometitor's platform gets initially > Smaller cut of the $$$ but will keep getting $$$ from online subscription; other games; accessoires etc.

Anyway not just Xbox should also be more active in their own catalog sales, 80% of Capcom games sold last year were old(er) catalog games...it is basically free money.

Well Bethesda/Acti ports have always been on PS5 anyway so there's not going to be a revenue change there.

They've mainly only done late ports and the stuff that came day one like Outerworlds 2 underperformed everywhere. They've had a lot of software misses in general with Avowed/Hellblade 2 also performing poorly.

FH5 managed to reportedly sell over 5m copies on PS5 despite coming to the system over 3 years late though, probably made more on PS5 than all other XGS PS5 releases combined.

The issue is the amount of studios they have.... game development is expensive.
This is development costs vs Game-pass effects.

Multi platform was like a band-aid that helped the bleeding.

The solution is obvious..... timed exclusives return.
Day and Date dies (gamepass games are offered after like 4-6months only, even xbox 1st party ones).

All the issues goes away.... if you grow your console hardware user base, and get them back to buying games.

(However we're mid a ram/storage crisis... its costly to grow a user base atm. Which again, points back to why Phil was going the other direction)

Fuck yes! After a 2 years wait Hi-Fi Xbox physical is finally shipping!

Edit: ehh answered to an old post

"#2: We will end this fiscal year at about a 3% accountability margin, down year-over-year. Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue."

If your revenue is down half a billion "annually" for over 5 years....... does that mean $2.5 bn in total less revenue today, than 5 years ago?

And they pumped $20 bn into the console to try and improve things, but the end results are that the revenue line keeps going down year on year?

Holy hell.... She is dunking on Phil & Sara.

She kinda dunks on them even more on #3 on the hardware side of things. That Xbox pays more for components than competitors because of choices made over the past 5 years.

It's been numerously reported, but is also obvious in many regions where Xbox consoles are just no longer sold, that console shipments were intentionally scaled back to help improve profit margins and make Xbox more of a software-based business. Which on the surface, I can kinda see why Phil and Sarah came to that decision. Xbox has never made a profit on console sales in its entire 25-year history, which obviously brings down profit margins substantially. But at the same time, if you don't have enough consoles to sell, then no one can then buy them if they wanted to, where they could end up spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on the platform.

And to make matters worse, Phil & co couldn't have predicted a global component shortage. So it created a perfect storm in a way as manufacturing was intentionally brought to a crawl, but then there's very little to nothing Asha can do currently to ramp manufacturing back up.

Phil dreamed of a world without exclusivity from the very beginning, he talked about it years before day one Gamepass killed 1st party software sales. He did interviews talking about how he was forward thinking and that a future would exist without any exclusives. And to his credit, I think he actually believed that, and he put his money where is mouth was by giving away quite alot of exclusives. Sony and Nintendo did not reciprocate even a tiny bit. Phil had also convinced Microsoft's bean counters that it was a path to more money, which he was clearly wrong about, the extra revenue from ports wasn't enough to offset the decline in hardware or Gamepass subs, which I'm positive is why Phil retired and Sarah was let go.