Building trust back up that there is a reason to invest in the Xbox ecosystem again with the next-generation around the corner. Though, you can only build up trust so much if the Helix is going to be $1,200+. Xbox and PlayStation both need a more entry level console that is just a little more powerful than the current consoles and sell it at $800 or lower at launch. And hope prices are actually able to come down over the generation.

I know with Xbox they aren't going to stop releasing games on PC, but I wonder if they will try to push the Xbox PC app more and potentially release fewer games on Steam. Or at least give perks for buying/playing games on the Xbox PC app over Steam. 

Yeah I'm fully expecting Xbox to release a Series S equivalent Helix device since it's being described as a family of devices.

Asha's talked about innovating in the hardware space to help combat the insane prices and component shortages. Definitely gonna need all the help they can get lol.

This is also why I believe we're gonna end up seeing Elder Scrolls 6, Physint, StarCraft, Diablo V, Obsidian's Fallout, etc as console exclusives. If the console is truly going to be the centerpiece of the business model going forward, and we're at a time where console hardware is more expensive than ever before, then you've got to put out MAJOR releases to sell hardware.

I do agree that they need to push the Xbox PC app more as well. There's a huge overhaul on the way. Once they have a proper modern storefront, then they can see what else they can do to help entice PC players outside of just PC Game Pass.

Another unknown regarding E-Day's sales is how many premium editions or premium upgrades were purchased. That would also increase the amount of money the game makes that wouldn't be counted as game sales.

There's too many angles when it comes to Xbox's game success metrics lol

If the 400k sales is true, and the 700k premium edition as of October 10th is true, we'd be at around 400k sales and 900k-1m premium edition upgrades right now as of October 30 most likely. So 400k times an average price of lets say $80 ($70 for standard and $100 for people who bought premium edition to start with equals $32m. 900k x $30 is $27m. So $55m in direct revenue so far. What we don't know is how many Gamepass sub it drove or how many months they stay subbed for, one of the day one Gamepass factors that go into a success formula. 

We're probably tracking towards 3x this nearly first month revenue figure lifetime, so $165m in direct revenue lifetime. Add on whatever the revenue is from Gamepass subs the game caused, against a $400m budget figure, which likely isn't that high because it appears to be the entire studio's spending over the 6 years Gears E-Day was in development for, which includes toolsets being built for Unreal 5 development across all Xbox studios and at least 3 non-Gears games being directly assisted on by The Coalition.

Gears of War: E-Day did cost $500 million, according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier: "That is a real number. That is real. That's what we're looking at here, that's what [AAA] games cost to make. Especially in North America these days".

Just another reminder that Xbox should have invested in other regions that are so much cheaper like Asia.

PC Game Pass and to a much smaller extent Xbox Play Anywhere is the reason to use the Xbox PC app. But they need to do more than that. I'm not sure skipping Steam entirely would be a good idea. Though I guess if every first-party game was exclusive to the Xbox PC app / Battle.net on PC that would get people to use it. 

They could possibly give people that purchase the Xbox PC / Xbox console version of a game some extra in-game content for free. It doesn't have to be much. A new outfit, weapon skins, maybe the equivalent of $5 or $10 of in-game currency for live service games. 

Something still feels off about that number to me. Exactly how many assistance studios worked on Gears E-Day, has anyone looked through the credits to see? At The Coalition itself, there are 271 people working there according to LinkedIn. The average pay for video game design in Vancouver Canada is around $82k a year Canadian, which because the US dollar is worth 71% of Canadian dollar, shrinks the average pay for Vancouver to $58k USD a year. Benefits packages tend to amount to about 40% of salary, so another $24k a year on benefits packages. So, around $83k a year USD per year per employee at The Coalition.

So 271 people times $83,000 pay times 6 years = $134m in payroll and benefits over the 6 years that Gears E-Day was in development for. Let's assume that The Coalition pays 30% more than the average for a game studio in Vancouver because they are a high end AAA studio. That is still is just $174m in payroll and benefits at The Coalition itself over the 6 years Gears E-Day was in development for.

How the hell does $174m balloon into $500m? I know that they aren't paying the voice actors movie actor tier paychecks, many aren't getting more than the SAG-AFTRA minimum for digital media voice acting, which is now $1.1k per 4 hour, 3 character recording booth session and another $236 towards their own private pension and health insurance plan. Maybe Marcus Fenix himself, John DiMaggio, a legend in the voice acting community, got like $1m total for all of his voice acting sessions for Marcus in E-Day, but few are the voice actor that are popular enough to negotiate to anywhere near that amount.

Basically, for $174m to balloon into $500m, they would need to have at least 300 devs across all support studios working on the game the entire 6 years, and for those support studios to be in high cost of living US cities where pay is the highest. If that is the case, AAA dev team sizes sure do need to shrink, because damn that is an insane manhour figure.

It would be funny if the $500 million cost is in Canadian as The Coalition are based in Vancouver. That would put the price a bit over $350 million USD.

I mean the credits is long....

Lucky Fable is cheap....

That is alot of support studios. People Can Fly assisted in a pretty significant capacity it looked like, while Behaviour Interactive and quite alot of other studios supported on single areas instead of generalist support across most facets of game design like People Can Fly did. Behaviour for instance assisted on programming while a Beijing China studio called Mindwalk did quite alot of character and environment Art support, just as 2 examples of the many specialist studios that supported the game. All in all it seems like probably 1000+ worked on game design in some capacity, and probably over 400 at Coalition and People Can Fly worked on it in in a significant capacity, plus localization teams and such.

AAA has simply gotten too big at this point, and between the sheer size of the dev teams including support studios, and the fact that so many of those studios are in high cost of living US cities were there salaries have to be high to compensate, it really drives up budgets to insane levels.