That last part is an insane thing to say in light of latest happenings. Anyway, my prediction of the future of GP is that the PC tier will become GP itself, and will get its own tiers down the line, considering how, you know, Xbox as a specialized hardware is dying.

Are you saying I said something insane or the linked source?

"that's what makes them all the money now". It's not, the only thing making them money now is game sales on Steam and PlayStation.

GamePass generated $5bil in 2024 alone for Microsoft, and a big chunk of the remaining $18.5bil came from software sales (e.g. Activision’s CoD & Candy Crush). The cut Microsoft receives from third-parties selling on Xbox is negligible in comparison to these other two, and with hardware needing to become more and more expensive so as to not be sold at a heavy loss (due to inflation, tariffs, etc.), and consequently retailers rejecting Xbox hardware due to not moving units quick enough, the last thing Microsoft probably wants to be thinking about is another decade of this hardware turmoil. Especially with the Activision merger costing them so much (they’ve got a hole to fill).

That's the number they told us right before doubling the price of the tier that offers day 1 releases because it made they lose billions in COD sales. If GP is working so well, why didn't they keep the prices as they were?

But you did well on remembering the mobile games from King, that's probably where most of the gaming revenue is coming from tbh.

…why would raising prices be indicative of a product “no working well”? E.g. PS5 is pushing some very solid hardware figures, yet it keeps getting more and more pricey. Businesses simply like to see how far they can push prices before it becomes a burden on profits.

We can't really say how successful/profitable GamePass is without knowing the full data breakdowns of Microsoft's entire gaming business. The $5 billion GamePass figure by itself is meaningless. MS refuses to provide useful data for us to work with.

I think it's safe to say that their gaming profits are primarily made from mobile phones, PC, and other consoles.

You do that when you're winning, they are not winning. There are people in this forum who have been saying that MS are raising console prices not just because of greed or tariffs, but because they want out of the console market and that's their way out. That's a good theory, but we have an alleged ex employee literally saying MS lost $300 Million in CoD sales because of GP. We had Sony saying in court that they can't match Microsoft with their day 1 GP releases, because that's just burning money at that point. And we have just common sense. GP is not profitable, never was.

Why would GamePass revenue include cost of game development when the games are available outside of the service and outside of the Xbox ecosystem? Make it make sense, if possible, which isn’t likely based on the video in the OP.

What MS propaganda are you whining about? It’s just good old fashioned common sense.

This $300mil figure is a little misleading (and I don’t find it entirely reliable TBH…). I question the reliabaulity for two reason: (i) That would mean ~50mil full priced copies of CoD were lost through GamePass alone, which just seems unfathomable. Additionally, (ii) the source citing this figure are former employees, so worthy of a grain of salt. (Recall how Concord was once cited as costing Sony around $400mil, when the official figure ended up being almost half that. Could certainly be happening here.) Now, as for how this figure is misleading? It cites only the losses and not the gains Microsoft may have seen in their subscription service. With revenue at $5bil in 2024 alone, and $5.5bil projected for 2025, I could certainly see this $300mil deficit easily being covered by the growth of GP.

That said, however, the fact that Microsoft has chosen not to reveal official figures makes me question the service’s success. It could be indicative of losses (i.e. no net profit), could also be indicative of smaller profit than they were hoping for (but profitable nonetheless). No way to know anything for certain. If Sony claims that it is merely “burning money,” then maybe there is reason to suspect that GamePass was intended to be an instance of anti-competitive behavior, walloping around their deep pockets in order to provide consumers with the most affordable experience at a loss.