Starfield was supposed to be the game of the generation for Xbox and hardware sales fell anyway.

You keep bringing up College Football constantly and that thing only managed to keep the Xbox USA sales afloat 1 month with something like 100k units over the same month last year. August and September have been complete disasters. College Football had zero legs. Nil. Nada. Like happened with Starfield, the correction next year will be massive, around 70% or more to stay in line with the ~35% loss on average these past two years.

And GTA 6 or the current gen exclusive CoD is still too far fetched. There's zero guarantee that GTA 6 will launch next year and the impact from CoD will depend on how the current one does on Game Pass.

I honestly don't expect Gamepass haveing CoD to result in much of anything, hardware sales wise.
20$ a month, is alot.... theres a CoD fanbase that only buy 2-3 games a year, and while they might get CoD at full price, the other games will be at discounts or free to play. That type of user, isn't saveing anything by haveing access to the game on gamepass (240$ a year).

What I suspect will happend, is that the xbox console fanbase, where they have 15m or so gamepass subs, who would otherwise buy the game, now wont.
Because they have gamepass anyways, why buy, if you plan to stay fulltime subcribed anyways?  So maybe this is a loss of say 5m potential sales or something.

Then theres the type that just wants to play the campagne on pc.... alot of these guys, will subscripe for a month, and then cancel their subscription afterwards.

I could see gamepass eating into revenue for call of duty.
I'm not sure it will have any boost on console hardware sales.


GTA6 will boost sales of both consoles hardware, by alot.
Like alot alot... esp. if word of mouth is good. It will have a long tail end effect on hardware sales.

Yeah I keep bringing it up cause it's a good recent example of a current gen only game boosting hardware sales. The legs part is irrelevant to my point since as I said GTA 6 will obviously cause a much bigger boost than that game so even if it's mostly contained to just one month it'll still make a significant difference for that year and it getting delayed or not doesn't change the broader point about the long term prospects of the console since that'll just shift the boost forward by a few months or so if it does get delayed.

I'm not sure what your point with the Game Pass part is since I was referring to some players still on gen 8 consoles finally upgrading if the 2025 one isn't released on those.

In the UK supposedly for that month, the sales of xbox's doubled.
In the US, it had a simular effect.... and yet, the PS5 was still #1 for both unit sales and dollar sales that month.

GTA 6 effect, shouldn't last just a month and then drop off...  I expect much more from it, than starfield did.
Atleast in terms of staying around longer. Starfield kinda fizzled out quick.

I do think the boost from it won't just be for a single month. If it releases say September then I think October-December would also get boosted some and it would help 2026 overall at least a tad. For Xbox in particular this is a case where the Series S will make a difference since even if the version on that is poor some people will still go with it to play GTA 6 for cheap.

I agree.

If you talk about November + December, last year it did 2.8M. And this year you are saying 2M ? Having in mind all the drops happening through out the year, every month, and in every region, 2M is very optimistic, comparing it to 2.8M last year .. If 50% drops is here for the holidays too, then 1.4M. Even if we put it optimistic at 40% drop, it's still little over 1.6M which will result in 4.5M .. far from the 5M you talked about now, and some months ago, when I again reassured range of around 4 to 4.5M at max or something like that. Of course there may be adjustments again too soon, just like the previous times, they can be both down or up, however, with the data we have at this point, 4 to 4.5M is the most likely to me

I don't expect COD on Gamepass to have a major effect on Xbox hardware; most people will still play it on Playstation.
The casual consumer isn't going to buy a new console just to play COD on a premium subscription service when it's already available on every current and last gen PS/Xbox plus PC, and the hardcore consumer would be less inclined to buy a console with no exclusives.

I think the drops will be a lot smaller than 50% since it exceeded expectations last holiday and actually had the best December for the console yet even if only by a little bit. I just can't see it doing much less than 2m for the last couple months but we'll see. You are right that adjustments could change things since if I remember right 2022 was adjusted down for it in early 2023.

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Same. Series S GTA VI sales could very well be surprisingly good due to casuals, pushing sales into the mid 40's.

As long as next gen for XB isn't 2026, because if it is, MS is going to push GTA VI marketing for the next gen console(s) like the XB brand depends on it. The only way this wouldn't hinder Series sales, is if next gen there was only 1 SKU and it's $500 or more, then Series S sales could still do quite well until it was discontinued. 

If there was a new Series S2 equivalent, or a handheld (hybrid), next gen, in 2026, with massive GTA VI marketing, then Series S and X aren't going to hit 40m. MS would probably announce next gen early like they did with Series X in this case, but wouldn't care at all because they would want to move past XB Series even more so than they did with XB1.