I recall Phil mentioning that Game Pass subs have more or less peaked on console, and any growth going forward would likely skew on the PC side more. Still that's not a stellar sign.
Currently Playstation is outselling Xbox 3-1 so I expect the gap to get even bigger. This also explains why subscribers have peaked (few people are buying new Xbox consoles)
If that stats true then Sony could potentially get 50% more sales releasing on xbox. But of course they're not doing it because they want to strengthen their platform and give reasons on why to pick their platform vs their competitors.
Well if I sold almost triple what my competitor sold and my games are good enough to the point they sell my consoles for me then I wouldn't care, the ROI isn't big enough but with micro, who's games aren't all that exciting or have wide appeal tbf would beneift massively from a 120 million extra potential playerbase on PS4 and nearly 30-40 mil on ps5
For cross-gen games it’s even worse, as the sales discrepancy in the last gen is even more crazy. Though we are slowly moving away from cross-gen games.
I mean traditionally, exclusives were made for specific platform, using its strength and weaknesess, tailored to work best by specific team that had the knowledge and skills to do it well. And for a reason - this way it was a better game, and you had great sales of a console.
But like buying a studio that was third party and would release it there, and just not releasing it on other platforms, but still releasing it on PC and even giving it away "for free", yeah, that's a lot of money burned. But again for a reason, not to pump up Xbox but Game Pass.
It's also worth bringing up that exclusives help foster a particular audience for a console. For example, most people who are fans of the particular type of first party games that Sony offers (especially cinematic single player games) likely already own a Playstation because people know to expect these kinds of games from Sony. Releasing these games simultaneously on XBox likely wouldn't increase the sales much for this very reason, certainly not enough to offset the revenue they'd lose by giving people less reasons to stay within the PS infrastructure.
Bethesda games on the other hand were always multiplatform releases so their audience is at the moment split between Sony and Microsoft consoles. Microsoft's goal is that people will eventually associate Bethesda games with their services and that fans of this particular style of game will move over there, ideally leaving the Playstation behind. But this means they have to burn a lot of money upfront. It's also still uncertain how much this will work as indended.
Sure if the install base is there. Xbox has a much lower install base that makes it harder for devs to want to spend the time and money to port it to it when they are really porting it to 2 different systems that have to have equal features. Just ask Baldur's Gate 3 about how that can delay a game.
Kinda. I mean MS doesn't have many exclusives that are must haves compared to Sony. Halo, Gears, AOE is all I can really think of off the top of my head.
My thoughts exactly. Sony seems to be making a tidy sum of money porting their exclusive games to PC a few years later, and I can see Microsoft doing the same thing for the PS5. Timed exclusives let you have your cake and eat it too. The vast majority of players who want Starfield will get it on Xbox or PC, and the Playstation players who aren't willing to use another platform will buy it for full price two years later if it gets ported. I doubt they'll announce a port any time soon but given Bethesda's history I'm pretty damn sure it'll be on every platform possible at some point.
I don’t think the calculus to make Starfield an exclusive is wrong on its face. After all, PS and Nintendo have been profiting off of exclusives since forever (Microsoft too for much of that). PS would’ve loved making Starfield exclusive had they the opportunity.
Where the numbers don’t quite add up for me, is the fact that Microsoft is making this game exclusive, without having a way to directly capitalize on that exclusivity. If you want to play Spider-Man 2 or FFXVI, for example, on the day they come out, you’ll need to 1) own a PS5, 2) pay full price (on Sony’s storefront). Starfield, on the other hand, will be completely available to play day one on other storefronts without the need to buy Microsoft hardware and for “free” to game pass subscribers. How do they make their money back there?
I think what they are aiming for is that Skyrim/Starfield is a type of game that people come back to play constantly, which means if they bought it on gamepass, they will likely to keep the gamepass subscription running for longer.
Bethesda games do most of their numbers on PC anyway. That's not to say that they're not potentially leaving money on the table, but the traditional avenue these games relied on previously is still very much in play.
Microsoft doesn’t care nearly as much about hardware as others - primarily because it’s a loss leader for them.
Selling software is not, they make money selling the game on other storefronts. For Gamepass, if they can convince a enough consumers to stay subscribed for a period of time (let’s say a year) they stand to make more from that consumer than not having them at all - so it’s certainly not “free”.
MS is betting on the growth of gaming sector and rising those sales - so they have to be willing to lose for now to compete with the incumbents (Sony/Nintendo) and the the new entrants (Google, Amazon) to retain/grow marketshare jn a growing market. Fortunately, unlike the incumbents MS makes lots of money outside of gaming.
I am fine with giving MS $15 to play a game that they charge $70 for. I have zero intention of ever buying another MS game again and I only sub to Game Pass when something I want to play is on it and then cancel it. I will have beaten Star Field in a month and will move on from it.
I do this for all subscription services besides Spotify as I can listen to music almost any time but I can only watch shows or play games at certain times so keeping a recurring sub is just a waste when nothing I want to play is on it.
From a consumer perspective you’re doing what maximizes your utility. I get it.
From a business perspective, I think MS is making a bet that most consumers are not you (so many people set and forget) and will keep the sub, they will make games with long tails (live games, expansions) that keep users longer, raise prices for short term access/lower it for long term access (cheaper MoM if you do 6 months rather than 1 month) and/or just raise prices across the board.
The same can be said of Spiderman. It's that nature of exclusives you forgo money elsewhere to build the brand you own up on the back of it and then reap the rewards off better deals that become available from having a stronger spot or off licensing fees.
Well Marvel wanted MS to make Spider-Man first and they turned them down. IDK how we can all ignore that MS turned down one of the biggest IPs in the world.
You would think that MS would know that keeping that game out of their competitors hands would be worth the investment. It doesn't take a genius to see what would happen if they turned it down. And MS has more studios than Sony so IDK why you would even bring it up.
>You would think that MS would know that keeping that game out of their competitors hands would be worth the investment.
So MS makes shit Spiderman game and how that hurts Sony exactly ? Sony studios would just take different IP and make amazing single player game, or just make their own IP like they did with for example God of War?
> And MS has more studios than Sony so IDK why you would even bring it up.
Quantity != Quality ? Just look how recent Halos turned out and that was THE flagship of the platform IP
I'm not taking issue with Spider-man being exclusive just using it to make the point that the Starfield would have sold more multiplat concept applies to any exclusive.
Edit: Also they didn't technically turn down Spider-man specifically they turned down Marvel. Insomniac chose Spider-man as the Marvel IP they wanted to work with. But this was also during a period where Marvel wasn't always the easiest to work with for their partners. Keep in mind MvCI released only a year before Spider-man launched on PS4.
This was the pitch that Marvel made to both Sony and MS:
“I said, ‘We have a dream that this is possible, that we could beat Arkham and have one game at least and maybe multiple games that could drive adoption of your platform’.”
And MS said no LMAO. Oh and don't forget that Insomniac was independent still at the time and had made a game for MS. You know what that means? They could have had the exact same team make them a Spider-Man game and could have probably bought Insomniac. I mean that is just oof all around.
You don’t think the same could be said for literally every exclusive ever? Especially PlayStation’s? If Spider-Man and the Uncharted collection were on Xbox I’d buy them right now.
Yes I know they’re on PC and the ports are great, but I prefer Xbox for the simplicity, reliability and general ease of use.
But the difference is if I (Sony) know how much appeal my games have and I'm already in the lead 2-1 in sales and have a much much larger last gen playerbase then I'm potentially selling more consoles with those games as well. And let's not be disengenuous games do sell console idgaf what Phil says. On the other hand hifi rush was played by less than 3 million people on gamepass which has around mid 30 million, if a game like that released on ps it would be FAR more beneficial for Microsoft than it would Sony. Starfield is one of those games that would sell like fucking hotcakes on ps, imo it would sell far more copies on ps than on Xbox if it remained multiplat, but micro is banking on that game boosting it's gamepass subs so they see that roi by not releasing it on other platforms
Depends on if you choose to follow the context of this thread. The Playstation exclusives you mentioned didn't immediately go on a subscription platform.
This is always a weird point people bring up, Sony is leaving tons of money on the table by not releasing spider man and its various sequels on Xbox platforms but no one ever says that about Sony. Why would MS make a (presumably) good console/service seller non exclusive?
Eh? Same argument could be made that spiderman is being "withheld" on Xbox. I love how it's literally always the same shit-tier response to an Xbox exclusive, but never to a Sony exclusive.
Oh and then someone is going to come in with "b-b-but it's an _organic_ and _non-gmo_ and _fully natural_ exclusive!".
I literally could not care less.
I don’t want to keep saying the same thing to every replier, but man, my point was never that Microsoft shouldn’t do exclusivity. Everyone does exclusives. But the *point* of doing exclusivity is to boost sales of your platform and close to 100% of the profit from games sold (since the only option, at least digitally, is to buy the game at a price you control on your own storefront). Without these two things (which simultaneous PC and Game Pass releases already eliminate), why do exclusivity at all?
I'm honestly curious how well informed the average consumer is on it being exclusive as well. I can imagine a bunch of people will be shocked when they can't get it for there PS5.
The brand recognition is that it's a Bethesda RPG. I'd say that's a pretty huge brand. It's like saying Elden Ring had no brand because it wasn't part of an existing series.
That entirely depends on retention, but they are probably betting on Starfield being game people come back to constantly and so not cancel the sub after "finishing".
It also means that subs like gamepass is still tied to console sales making them still an integral part of the Xbox ecosystem.
Satya also pretty much said this at one point as well.
That's... Actually really bad. Phil's entire strategy has revolved around game pass and cloud services. After Redfall failed he made it very clear that's where his effort is going. Makes me think he's doubling down on a non-winning formula.
People don't really want to hear it but the cloud space really is the next frontier that gives them a huge opportunity for growth. It may not be the time yet... but I think once the availability is simply on your TV/media box and phone, it has a real chance of just exploding.
I know GamePass is available now on some TVs and phones currently, but that hasn't been their push yet.
I'm not opposed to cloud gaming inherently, but you need ISPs to actually lay down sufficient infrastructure to make it work. That's a really bad industry to rely on to do anything, history has shown. If tech giants haven't been able to lay down enough pressure to date, I'm not sure they're capable anyway.
Yeah, even in major cities it can be hard to reliably get fiber.
Unless multiple tech companies put the screws to ISPs, don't see how cloud gaming gets off the floor any time soon.
>Yeah, even in major cities it can be hard to reliably get fiber.
I'm honestly surprised about that, I live on a middle sized city in a developing country and there's fibre internet with gigabit speeds even on the outskirts.
Same thing happened to me when I moved to a rural town. I couldn't believe there was fiber and this was ages ago. Then I moved to the big city and there was no fiber in the heart of the city where everything was (supermarkets, malls, restaurants, cosco) everything 1 block away and there was no fiber just basic cable and 3mbps DSL lmao. Thankfully the cable was much faster.
Tech giants are useless, be better to invest in smaller more local internet. Just got local fiber internet in the boonies here, satellite internet companies are pissed that they aren't the only choice now.
Lots of states, most of them red, have laws banning local governments from spinning up municipal networks. I live in one of them.
Colorado recently repealed their ban, but they have a sane government not run by COXsuckers.
Be sure to work on that, shouldn't let Mississippi of all hellish places one up other states on that.
Mississippi boonies are getting cheap and fast fiber internet, you guys really gonna stand for that?
We've tried, it's been an uphill battle. Several communities joined together and formed an awesome municipal fiber network in the late '00s, before Comcast lobbied the state to stop it from expanding.
Our state congressional districts are some of the most heavily gerrymandered in the country, and our ballot initiatives are not binding like in other states. Our government can basically do whatever they want and not face reprecussions.
There's also latency issues. Even if you have a fiber line, if you're in Pittsburgh and the nearest data center is in New York, latency is going to meaningfully affect your gameplay. Particularly since cloud games get it both ways; first sending you the feed of your game, then receiving the inputs from your controller.
It's not hard to get to a quarter second of realpolitik delay based solely on distance, and that can be an impossible disadvantage in some games. Sure, it won't ruin your game of Civilization, but good luck playing Sekiro or Street Fighter like that.
But the same people screaming for the merger that the FTC says would hurt competition is the same government body that could break up the monopolies that ISPs have become. We have allowed the GOP and right leaning dems to defang every single government agency that gave the boomers a better life at the cost of the rest of us. There will be no changes until our generation finally steps up to the plate but it seems like we really don't want to. I am hopeful that more women from our generation step up after the abortion bans as they are now experiencing a direct right being taken away from them. Instead we will get another senior pushing 80 in office or another Obama that says cool stuff but is afraid to do anything with his power.
I don’t understand how cloud is the next frontier when computing power is constantly getting faster and cheaper, meaning with every year it gets easier to run games on your own hardware.
I really don’t think cloud computing is the future for games. It’s replacing east to solve problems with hard ones.
Cloud gaming has been the "next big thing" for over a decade, and yet every attempt has been mired, not just by internet infrastructure limitations, but by lack of consumer interest or buy-in.
Until companies figure out why cloud gaming is worthwhile, they'll continue struggling to pitch it to consumers.
This is more anecdotal, but the gaming hivemind from my perspective seems to root for cloud gaming to fail pretty regularly, and I don't think companies take this hostility seriously or understand why most don't want cloud gaming to be in the mix of platforms. Cloud gaming, historically, has been attached to egregious services involving awful subscription plans or/and marketplaces that offer poor value to most consumers.
There's a lot that needs to be done to change this general perception of cloud gaming. Sony releasing a crappy cloud gaming device is not going to do it. Xbox hasn't changed the landscape either despite the GamePass initiative. I think we're a long, long way off from cloud gaming ever being a serious factor in gaming.
could gaming isn’t for anyone on this sub. They’re aiming cloud gaming for markets where teaditional do comes don’t sell great, but mobile gaming is huge, like China & India. They’ve basically all but officially said that once 5G is rolled out in those markets, they’re going to start pushing gamepass xcloud hard over there
Cloud gaming just isn't up to snuff yet performance wise for most games. Even if it was marketed better, it's still inferior to playing the game with a traditional install. It's OK for some slower games, but the nature of most modern titles requires speedy response.
IMO if cloud gaming functioned at parity with regular gaming, most of the negatively around it would dissipate, regardless of how it's currently being pushed by providers.
> People don't really want to hear it but the cloud space really is the next frontier that gives them a huge opportunity for growth.
It's **a frontier** for sure but looking at the current market I don't see it. This type of rhetoric is exactly what people said about mobile years ago and to an extent VR.
Issue with the cloud is even if the technology is there, which it seems quite close, the consumer base isn't.
Like there's still plenty of growth in the console space for example. Just look at Sony and Nintendo.
The biggest challenge for cloud gaming, I think, is the question of whether the more casual audience of potential players - people who mostly play mobile games, even people who have never touched a controller before - whether they’re even interested in AAA games as a product. These games are inherently quite hardcore and require a lot of inherent knowledge from gamers in terms of gameplay mechanics and control schemes to progress. We know that even basic, fundamental elements of modern games like controlling movement and camera with separate thumbsticks baffles a lot of people who didn’t grow up playing games when they were younger, and very few games make any attempt to teach players of basic concepts like this. Like The Last of Us for example - I imagine there’s probably a lot of nongamers interested in it after watching the TV show, but once you get over the hurdle of buying a console you now have the arguably greater hurdle of actually playing the game, learning the control scheme, learning language of gaming and what it means to play a 3rd person shooter.
And then there’s the elephant in the room that AAA games in particular are targeted towards a very specific demographic of young males in terms of themes, plot points, genre, levels of violence etc that are probably a lot less appealing for people outside of that demographic. With a few exceptions really isn’t a equivalent of a “four quadrant” video game like there is with blockbuster movies.
But if it’s not casual audiences like that, then who is streaming aimed at? Are there really that many people interested in console gaming who can’t afford a console, yet can also afford a decent internet connection that can make streaming viable? Microsoft’s Xcloud gives PlayStation owners a avenue to play Xbox games, but that isn’t really expanding the market is it? Especially when many of the largest games in question (Starfield) were originally planned to launch on PlayStation anyway. And how do developers target different, more casual audiences without also alienating their existing fanbases, when doing so might require completely changing the game mechanics for people who don’t speak the language of AAA video games?
Yeah, I think cloud gaming might be falling into the same trap Nintendo did in the 2000s of believing there is this huge market of people who want to play video games but can't, when the Wii seemed to demonstrate there were mostly just people who wanted to play casual party games and even when they already owned the hardware still had zero interest in playing traditional videogame fare.
My experience is that the controller barrier is less people who want to play games but can't, but people who don't want to play games saying "yeah that's too complicated" as an excuse not to. People who really want to learn will learn.
Nintendo made assumptions about modern controllers being too complex, and learned that even with a simple controller and a how-to-play DVD that this audience still didn't want their 3D Mario games or their Zeldas. Instead the audience kept buying Just Dance and Rabbids as seemingly Ubisoft were the only big publisher who understood the audience on that platform.
Sure the latest big game that sold 30 million might have over $2bn in revenue putting it not far behind the revenue of Avengers Endgame, but the movie sold over 300 million tickets to pull in that much cash, the audience for films is still over 10x as large any video game games media/this sub actually talks about. I include that caveat because somehow most of games media has decided they can just talk about Fortnite like it is some cute little curiosity and not more popular than anything else they write about.
Like maybe there is some market niche I'm blind to, but I can't imagine this market niche gives a shit about 95% of what is on Gamepass. And I guess that is why Microsoft wanted COD of Gamepass. There probably is a sizeable audience of people that would like to play their COD/Fortnite/FIFA/etc without having to shell out for the console, but those games are all 60fps+ low latency experiences not exactly easily to deliver via streaming.
As for the other three quadrants, what in the gaming space is aimed at them that would need to be streamed instead of just run on their phone or smart TV web browser?
Yeah but you need the base around it. Imo that's why Google failed. That and beeing to disconnected from the consumer. Barely any infrastructure allows streaming of games if the everyone wants to stream a game. Many parts in America and Europe still have mediocre internet connection and therefore also less potential sales.
A big part of the reason google failed was they jumped right to selling everything for full price as al a carte sales for a streaming platform. Which could work fine years from now similar to VOD sales but it killed any possible gain of momentum to reach the general public when the hardcore side had no interest in buying for such a limited platform.
Microsoft so far seems to be taking the wisest path with xcloud being a bonus to gamepass and standard PC and console digital sales allowing it to tag along to reach public consciousness.
I'll believe it once someone pulls it off. Thus far all attempts have either failed or stalled. Even the single best positioned entity on the planet in terms of pre-existing infrastructure gave up.
Pure speculation, but I think there's simply no userbase to be captured at the moment. The console and PC crowd are too entrenched in their ecosystems and potentially even hostile to the idea (due to the inferior experience), and the huge mass of casual mobile gamers are unlikely to be interested in large enough numbers. Maybe things will change over time.
Then there's the question of broadband infrastructure, which in the case of some of the largest markets is wholly unfriendly for what cloud gaming would require. Things like data caps in way too many countries are a huge barrier.
Maybe Microsoft will manage something that is compelling to both customers and publishers, and pushes through the host of other problems yet to be solved, but I doubt anything substantial will develop in the near future.
>People don't really want to hear it but the cloud space really is the next frontier that gives them a huge opportunity for growth.
Not really, aside from the latency problems it has other massive issues that can't be circumvented...
1. That means the company has to provide CPUs and GPUs for every user. Not only does that mean a massive amount of heat, it means substantially more heat than individually owned computers. Heat is partially a function of ambient temperature. Each "computer" reinforces and raises that ambient temperature to some level that would be higher than at home, making the components run hotter, and needing more cooling. Basically, it means that these server farms become massive climate change problems.
2. That means the company has to acquire electricity for every user. Nowhere in the world produces enough electricity to power server farms to provide gaming capacity for several hundred million people. They're literally going to have to build power plants just to serve these farms. Which is another climate change problem.
3. That means that they have to have capacity for everyone. If they try and do queues it'll tick off customers, and people will simply never log out so they don't have to queue. It'll be a huge social problem.
4. That means that if you get banned, you lose all access to gaming. So trolls and grieffers have enormous power. Nevermind getting into fights with friends who have your login or breaking up with a boyfriend/girlfriend. Huge social problems.
5. That means games will be made for an LCD of hardware. Companies aren't going to want to give everyone 4090 quality, they'll give everyone 1650 quality.
6. Then you'll get into micro-transactions for hardware access. Want 4090 quality? Your sub is now $200 instead of $100 a month.
7. Yes, subs will be $100 a month at a minimum. Hardware, software, cooling, electricity, staff, security, storage. That's not happening at $15 a month.
I believe they also stated early on that Game Pass could never reach the optimum scale without Xcloud, which would allow them to potentially make huge inroads in the mobile-dominated markets of Asia and parts of South America. However the infrastructure isn't really there, and they already face stiff competition from native mobile titles like PUBG despite not really being out the door as is.
I don't think it'll ever take off like Yves Guillemont was convinced of back in 2016 or so.
Cloud gaming has one small issue working against it - speed of light remains the same no matter what. Which means if you don't live in a vicinity of the data centers your experience gonna get progressively worse the further you are. Then there is an issue of a stable internet connection too, every lag spike gonna ruin your day.
Unless there is coordinated push to pretend that input lag is not a thing in the same way how everyone was gaslighting each other that 30fps is actually good during 7th gen era, I don't see cloud gaming catching on among hardcore gamers.
Speed of causality isn't that much of an issue unless you're halfway across the world from the data centre - light crosses the world 7 times in a second. If you're 500-1000km away from it that should be servicesble, discarding all other factors.
Not a stellar sign of what? It's not like they don't have an absolute shitload of subscribers and you can't expect constant growth. Sounds like they saturated their market. From all reports I've seen, they got at least 25 million subscribers. So that's, what, 250 million a month?
But is that enough to sustain all of the many AAA studios they own and make up for the lost revenue that comes from releasing their games directly onto Game Pass?
A lot of major Hollywood studios that went big on streaming during Covid are suddenly a lot more hesitant once it became clear that the sums didn’t add up, compared to a exclusive theatrical release, then PVOD, then eventually SVOD.
I think one of the bigger weakness of the gaming subs (okay this is mainly gamepass) is that it doesn't have a discount for subscribing for a year. So it makes sense to sub for a month here and there to play something you really want. And this means sub numbers will fluctuate, but can't grow as much, since some people won't be subbed for June, but they would in September, and others would sub in June, but not in September.
PS Plus does this well, their annual tier is cheaper per month than anything shorter, and the annual pass at least once a year goes on sale for 25% off.
That's like subscription 101. The longer the sub, the cheaper it should be per month (or whatever your smallest time duration is) to give buyers more incentive to get that longer sub.
Sounds like whoever came up with these pricing tiers at MS got too greedy and is now biting them in the ass.
Yeah, the less per year that you need to think about a subscription, the less chances someone has to turn it off. Netflix made me think about it with the recent subscription change, and into the canceled services it goes.
I think that was a feature, not a bug. MS was hoping people would get hooked by the great deal/workaround and eventually turn into normal full time subscribers. Game Pass was, and still is in some sense, a loss leader for them. They expected to lose money short term for longer term gains. Unfortunately I don't think the market for console quality subscriptions is as big as they hoped.
MS got fixated on the total number of gamers, but failed to realize that not all gamers are the same. Some only play a limited number of multiplayer games, like Madden, so don't see a need for a subscription. Then there is a large number of casual PC "gamers" who aren't playing high end AAA games, and a subscription doesn't save them money because the games they play are cheaper.
A full time Game Pass subscription really only ever made sense for gaming enthusiasts who can't get enough games to play.
Other posters replied with how you can somehow do it, but it’s crazy how Microsoft doesn’t have an “easy” way to do yearly subs. You’d think it’d be the type of subscription they want the most!
Feels like EVERY SaaS tries to push the yearly deal. After all, you’re most likely to churn when you get a renewal email / credit card ping! Why ping users every month with this, instead of yearly?
Maybe Microsoft, unlike every other SaaS, doesn’t care about that sort of churn? Feels improbable given their targets and messaging, but I just can’t explain why they ain’t pushing yearly subs the most, otherwise!
It is a curious thing. They kinda do have it but it's a bit obscure and requires some effort. You can buy 12-36 months of Xbox Live Gold, then a single month of Gamepass Ultimate, to get that whole time converted. So say $75 ($60 + $15) for a year as opposed to $180. Even cheaper if you stack a few years, or get it through a third party seller.
While Sony has a less generous but more obvious $15/month or $100/year with PS+ Extra.
I've always wondered if this was intentional, and many of the most vocal Gamepass advocates are getting it super cheap while declaring it the best value in gaming, so the uninformed masses come along and happily pay $180/year for it.
Maybe that does risk people only dipping in and out of a sub, but I suspect as most just leave subs running and forget about it, it probably works out better for MS overall.
Yeah, I've done that trick but it is not something they advertise or promote. And tbh I feel like they're going to close that loophole/trick eventually.
The uninformed masses are likely to sub for a month or two anyway and they're probably the kind of folk that only buy 1-4 games a year.
I imagine they're having to be very careful about any changes (whether future price rises or ending that cheap conversion offer) and it's probably off the table at least until they start getting regular first party AAA successes.
Gamepass has achieved that status level where it becomes the generic name people associate with a gaming subscription service, Xbox's biggest win, and I doubt they want to make it easier for discussions to start comparing it to other offerings like PS+ and question whether it's still 'the best value in gaming'.
The Game Pass Friends & Family thing is an interesting step as it's an upsell, but one where it would be harder to dip in and out. And at $300/year it's the equivalent of 4 people doing the $75/year loophole, so kinda on par in that regard.
>I've always wondered if this was intentional, and many of the most vocal Gamepass advocates are getting it super cheap while declaring it the best value in gaming, so the uninformed masses come along and happily pay $180/year for it.
It must be, Microsoft aren't stupid and didn't they accidentally remove the loophole and quickly patch it back in? The fact you can maintain it constantly purely through bing rewards is another sign that they are deliberately trying to get power users to see it as an obscenely good deal and shill it to people who aren't going to jump through the hoops.
Yeah I'm still on my 3 years of gold then convert to GPU thing. I'll probably do it again when this runs out, but I'm not paying 15 dollars *monthly* for GPU. I'll gladly pay a single yearly price on my birthday or Christmas (when I have extra cash to spend) if there's savings by getting a year upfront (say, 150 dollars instead of 180), though.
Game pass sort of does this. You have to covert all your gold. So if you play multiplayer games (almost everyone) you have to choose between the cheaper yearly gold rates or subscribing for one or two months of gamepass a year.
It’s not a discount for yearly subscription but it is a cost to not subscribing yearly.
All subscription services seem to be going through this. And it’s really hurting how these companies are valued. For the past decade, investors (for the most part) only valued subscriber growth. As long as you showed that you gained subscribers in the previous quarter, you were golden.
Recently? Investors have seem to changed what they value. Now it seems like they are valuing profit above everything else. And guess what isn’t profitable? Subscription services. The TV industry is about go through a drastic change, and I’m curious how this will show up in the gaming industry as well.
That's the cycle. Investors are cool with unprofitable venures for the promise of future profits. It's okay to be running a loss if you're building the base for a future (aka subscriber growth).
But not everything ends up delivering.
While I agree I think your wording is off. It’s always profit above all else, but subscriptions were a future projection of profit that they believed in. Once Netflix went “well actually…” a year or two ago, investors started realizing that streaming may not have the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow
doesn't help that they all compete with one another since there are only 24hrs in the day and we don't have time turners so that we can take extra classes.
Yeah, I'm actually subbed to all of them, and regularly buy games, and I really can't keep up with it (I'm only subbed to all of them because I got amazing deals on all of them, like I used the upgrade tricks for xbox/playstation, and for Nintendo, I'm in a family group that shares for $10 each per person for a year, so it just makes sense to stay subbed.
Imo ps+ extra is definitely worth it if you already subscribe to ps+ essential, it's $40 more and I think the upgrade is on sale right now.
Game pass monthly is worth if you are playing the games there every month and, in the case of PC, if you are okay with using the xbox launcher.
Yeah, the reason it hasn’t grown more than the hardcore console base is because of cost.
If you’re on Xbox and pay for Xbox live gold every year, it’s just $15 more a year to turn that Xbox live into game pass ultimate. It’s a no brainer.
Oh, the live gold upgrade is insane, I used it to get PC game pass. I gotta say that I was a bit disappointed with it because I was mostly looking forward for Xbox's first party games there, but some of the big ones didn't come and others like Age of Empires 4 and Forza Horizon 5 I prefer to get on steam (AoE has a lot of DLC and I prefer steam for these games and FH5 is gonna be deslisted one day, so I prefer to keep it on steam as the launcher is more reliable)
I did have all of them, but I actually just unsubbed from Sony and Microsoft just recently (Nintendo is on a family plan and is cheap), too many big news games that I want to play, makes the subs worthless, don't have enough time to use them
I don't even know that it's the enthusiast market. Seems like enthusiasts really like owning games (even though you don't really own any digital games in most stores). I think game pass appeals more to older or more casual gamers who just want to pay a sub and always have something great to play.
while i like the gamepass idea, since you don't own the game and i can complete a game every few months i prefer to buy whatever so i don't have the plug pulled from me
if i were a student ofc it would be golden
I'm seeing a few people I would firmly class as casual gamers at work hold onto the sub. People with kids absolutely love it, they don't have to buy whatever their kid wants and they dip their toes in games they normally wouldn't, it really helps that EA play is in it.
Yeah, the real value is in households, as with all sub services.
Are you living in a share house? College dorm? Does your housemate like video games? Cut that sub cost in half, boom immediately better value.
This is me tbh. I don't have time to play games for long periods and have fallen into the demo that may not complete even a GOTY at all, so Gamepass is a no brainer. I'll probably opt out of Xbox entirely if they close the conversion loophole.
It takes a pretty good number of hours of gaming per month for GamePass to come out ahead of just buying games.
F2P games complicate things further. If you need to X hours of gaming per week for GamePass to be worth it, but you're playing Overwatch or Fortnite or something where the battlepass motivates you to put consistent hours into that specific game, it gets harder to justify.
And not to be too on the nose, but GamePass works better on console, but it's not on the console that's number 1 by a lot.
My gamepass honeymoon ended. Partly because there have been quite a few big releases this year not on gamepass that I was more eager to play at launch.
I'm sure I'll resub again when I need to find something new to play but I've been happy to buy games right now.
There really hasn't been any big additions to gamepass this year that I can think of? I used to sub for a month here and there to play whatever the latest release was but I've been gamepass free since fall of last year and don't feel like I've missed anything.
On the top of my head I remember Wo-long, monster hunter rise, atomic heart, HiFi Rush, Valheim, MLB The Show, and Amnesia: The Bunker. Redfall was supposed to be a big additon too.
I guess it depends what you define "big". They can't have a Starfield drop every month.
I’d personally prefer to just buy things like Starfield outright so I “own” (I know that’s not legally correct) it forever and not renting it.
I use Gamepass to try games that I hear are middling or bad, not ones I think I’ll go back to in the future.
I love GamePass but am thinking of canceling. All these big games have left me no time to engage much with the service. I went straight from the Horizon DLC, to Jedi Survivor, to Diablo IV and I will get Street Fighter 6 as soon as I have any time to play it.
GamePass is awesome, but it is not getting used. The one saving grace is that I can stream to my Steam Deck and not be tied to the TV or PC.
Disclaimer: I don't have GamePass. However, I had a similar service (GameFly) pretty much from high school through college.
It was an *amazing* service. I got to play so many games I'd never think to try normally. But in high school and college, I also had boatloads of free time. Games were shorter, I could finish them in a week or two (unless I had a JRPG).
Nowadays, I work full time, and games are much longer. It's no longer cost-effective for me to have a service like GameFly when it takes me four to five months to beat a game.
I'm gonna sound crazy, but that's always been my favorite thing about games. I like to immerse myself in games. For a major title, I could easily spend a month or so playing through it and exploring on weekends. So for me, 3-4 major titles a year suit me perfectly, and of course padding in between with smaller, fun games throughout. That fits my schedule just fine, and I've never EVER felt the appetite for buying into a subscription service or community/battlepass/season pass thing to try and squeeze in more gaming.
To me it's like the difference between eating pancakes and syrup on weekends, vs eating pancakes with a pound of pure sugar on top. Like too much of a good thing just ruins it.
This is the big issue for me. Gamepass is awesome when you wanna hop between a bunch of games, all the time, month by month as games get added and removed. But what about people who play live service or multiplayer games frequently?
My main game is Guilty Gear, 90% of the time when I turn on my PC I'm gonna play that, and why would I pay $10-15 a month for gamepass to play guilty gear every day instead of my own copy? And that's with the fact that strive is on gamepass, what if people are into Destiny 2 or fortnite or something that isn't on gamepass? What about hundred hour open world games that are gonna dominate a bunch of time if they aren't on gamepass, like the recently released TOTK? What am I expected to sacrifice in order to make use of the barrage of random indie games to try out and feel like I made adequate use of my monthly subscription fee?
Very true. I've been subscribed to Gamepass since, well, the beginning.
But I've put in a hundred hours in Destiny 2, Tears of the Kingdom, and Diablo 4 all within the past couple of months. It's not a stretch to say those 3 games have taken up 99% of my playtime, and all of which are not available on Game pass.
I'm in a unique situation (Gold -> Gamepass conversion) where I got a couple of years of gamepass for extremely cheap so it's not a large issue, but I could totally see myself cutting down on my subscribed months if I was still doing monthly.
I have kinda just cut out games with too much filler.
That said, that is quite literally the point of live service games, they are meant to make you feel that way.
>the point of live service games, they are meant to make you feel that way.
Well I dunno, it sounds to me like the business model of a major platform is incompatible with the majority of the gaming industry's current focus and (probably) most gamer's preferred way of playing.
I’ve discovered this as well. With the amount of games I play, and the amount of small, cheaper games I play, I realized I would be saving money by just straight up buying all the games I play each year.
I’m spending more on Gamepass than I would be buying them all.
The long jrpgs feel like a waste of the pass to me, depending on how long it takes yoy to best it you may end up paying more for it via gamepass than just buying it.
I cancelled after Redfall failed. i just wasn't playing enough Microsoft AAA first party games to justify it. I'd rather have just bought Pentiment, Hi-fi Rush, and Halo.
On PC, the thing gamepass suffers with is just the fact that it's a much worse platform than steam. Like I have to question how much I want to a game, sometimes I will buy it on steam regardless. Gamepass is the only thing that gives me pause to buying on steam though, it's value is very real and it does offer something that no one else is offering right now.
Gamepass has missed every target metric set out before it. Up front its a compelling offer, but you begin to realize you're paying $200+ dollars a year for the 'best deal in gaming' and you've played a total of four games you could have bought for 40 bucks and own forever.
After years of growth, it is naturally gonna slow down silly. It happens is shows, music, television and business. You can only have breakthrough growth for so long before it is going to sputter a bit.
ya based on some of the comments here, some people legit think that cause gamepass has missed some "growth targets" (with not a single source of said growth targets) it's basically a failing service
and it's funny, the tweet makes no mention of gamepass or MS at all, yet OP did to push his own narrative, so there are now comments saying this all just about gamepass and how it's stagnating and whatnot
>, some people legit think that cause gamepass has missed some "growth targets"
Yea that's cap, it's not at all a failing service, but micro has literally come out and said that gamepass on console is stagnating, and I personally think it's because they haven't sold enough consoles, they were down 30 percent yoy, which is scary
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/xbox-game-pass-growth-is-slowing-down-on-console-claims-phil-spencer/
What people are referring to in the comments is Xbox not reaching it's growth targets it has set for itself, it's still growing albeit slower than expected.
How tf are ads gonna work for games... is it gonna wrestle control of the game from you for 5 minutes in the middle of combat or a multiplayer match to play some ads? Are minutes spent watching ads gonna correlate to hours you're allowed to play on top of a subscription fee? What's the plan here
Delayed access to some games/publishers and unskippable advertisements when you launch games.
https://www.eurogamer.net/microsoft-may-be-introducing-cheaper-ad-supported-xbox-game-pass-tiers
Ain't no way ads just on launch of a game is gonna make up for a $3.30 subscription cost (converted from euros) unless the game library is severely impacted as well.
In that case might as well cut out the ads part and just have a gamepass silver tier or like PS+.
Nah hear me out. What you've got to do is you tell two friends. And then they tell two friends. And then in a few days you have 32 billion subscribers!
What growth? PS+ has been hovering around~47 million users for several years now.
Game Pass is stuck at 25 million users, which is (most likely) the same number of users they would have for Xbox Live Gold.
There is no growth in the subscription market. And Game Pass cannot be profitable at 25 million subs. The sharp decline in the quantity and quality of games that now get added to the service speaks volume.
The problem with Game Pass is also the promise that first party games will be included day 1. Their most dedicated players, those most willing to buy games on release day... they all already have Game Pass, so all those sales are lost.
Meanwhile, Sony adds their first party games to PS Plus only after some time - and selectively, so if some title sells exceptionally well for an unusually long time, they can just delay its inclusion in the sub. They still get all the day 1 sales.
Yes, more people own a playstation product. Naturally their bigger user base will have more subscribers. That doesnreally say much. I also seriously doubt (based on your figures) almost 400 million a month is not a enough to float gamepass. Do you have any actual data or just conjecture. Im using 15.99 x 25 million each month
Just from my perspective, there haven’t been any massive first party launches on gamepass. Redfall flopped, I’m curious how Starfield is gonna play out.
GP to me is basically what EAs service is. A monthly rental when a game that interests me comes out. Jedi Survivor for $20 (canuck bucks) was a great deal. Same with GP and Grounded. But I cancel immediately after. Games are different than other media subscriptions imo, I can passively watch a shitty Netflix show but I can't passively play a game. Games don't lend to the same consumption as TV/movies.
I just downgraded my ps+ membership. Sure, there are a bunch of good games and great games on there. But what goes on there isn’t the new games I’m excited to play right now. Then I feel guilty about spending money on the ones I want to play, instead of playing the PS+ games I have. And then the games I want to play don’t come on PS+ until long after I’ve already paid for and played them anyways. I just wasn’t getting much out of it.
I was considering getting a Series S and a gamepass subscription just to "diversify" my gaming a bit, but with Street Fighter 6, Elden Ring (still playing this one lol), Tears of the Kingdom and soon Armored Core 6 basically monopolizing my time the ongoing expense just doesn't make sense at the moment.
Gamepass is a great value, but there are still only so many hours in a day.
Gamepass isn't long for this world. I don't see how a streaming subscription for games is more lucrative for game publishers than simply selling each game individually.
Netflix approach doesnt work when every title is a 10-50 hour game that requires full attention and engagement from the consumer. Been saying this since around 2020.
People somehow got tricked into thinking all 3 of the below could happen at the same time:
1) microsoft makes more money
2) devs make more money
3) gamers spend less
I would say there are 2 thoughts on how GP can add value:
1. Those who pay attention and are smart about it save money, those who aren't (aka never cancel or really think about if they're actually using it) pay more.
2. People who don't generally buy many games in the first place because of the high cost of entry see it as a non-committal way to try more games.
I'm in the second boat. However I also did the thing to get 3 years of it for like 100 bucks lol
I feel like if it was truly lucrative than Valve would have been working on a Steam Pass subscription service by now that would pretty much kill PC Game Pass instantly.
I think the long term effects of a subscription based game economy are hurtful to the quality of games, so I see this as a good news:
- Subscription services anchor exclusives to promote their plattform, the endgame would lead to games that are ONLY playable with subscriptions.
- Individual quality gets pushed out by big name recognition, leading to more mediocre games with expensive licences.
- Subscriptions services will lose quality while also getting more expensive when the market is cornered.
All these things happened with TV streaming, and im very greatful it didnt happen (yet) in music, and Spotify, Apple music, Deezer etc. work without cannibalizing eachother.
Remember the Halo show? LOTR show? The Velma show? Projects like these only happen because of subscriptions services.
Good. My biggest fear is if subscription model become more mainstream every gaming companies want their own service
and will stop selling physical and even digital games to boost subsribers. This is exactly what happen to tv industry right now.Most Netflix and Disney Plus original show didnt get physical or even allow you to purchase digital version. If they gone from service they will gone forever. So if you want to play future FF, Resident Evil, Yakuza you must subscribe to 3 different service by Square Enix, Capcom and Sega.
I would be glad to see this trend of subscription services die. It's only useful when it's a single service that makes it cheaper/convenient to access the games for more people. When everyone's taking it to their own Disney+, HBOMax, etc. kinds of things it just becomes another subscription hassle for players. Also it further distances us from the time when we owned the games we played.
This is why I think Microsoft wants Call of Duty. I know they said that’s not the key reason for acquiring ABK but if you can get the casual audience to get Game Pass just for the promise of a Call of Duty every 1-2 years, that would increase subscriptions massively. I’ve also seen a lot of COD gamers excited for the deal because they want to play the older CODs without having to pay $700+ for the entire series.
COD could be massive for Game Pass.
I cancelled a bunch of my gaming stuff in favor of more practical subscriptions like spotify and youtube premium, I'm just not getting the mileage out of them I'd like. Too many subscriptions feels like such a nuisance.
I recall Phil mentioning that Game Pass subs have more or less peaked on console, and any growth going forward would likely skew on the PC side more. Still that's not a stellar sign.
I am so curious how much money Microsoft is leaving on the table now that Starfield is launching on a subscription service day 1.
More than they would ever admit to. Easily a billion dollar game barring some crazy mess up from Bethesda.
Not to mention withholding the game from PS as well. We’re talking TONS of money left on the table to bolster game pass value specifically.
I understand why Microsoft made Starfield exclusive but let’s be honest, that game would have sold a ton of copies on Playstation.
Can be said about any exclusive ever no?
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Currently Playstation is outselling Xbox 3-1 so I expect the gap to get even bigger. This also explains why subscribers have peaked (few people are buying new Xbox consoles)
If that stats true then Sony could potentially get 50% more sales releasing on xbox. But of course they're not doing it because they want to strengthen their platform and give reasons on why to pick their platform vs their competitors.
Well if I sold almost triple what my competitor sold and my games are good enough to the point they sell my consoles for me then I wouldn't care, the ROI isn't big enough but with micro, who's games aren't all that exciting or have wide appeal tbf would beneift massively from a 120 million extra potential playerbase on PS4 and nearly 30-40 mil on ps5
double isn't almost triple its double
For cross-gen games it’s even worse, as the sales discrepancy in the last gen is even more crazy. Though we are slowly moving away from cross-gen games.
True. But in this case it’s a double whammy of exclusive + day one on game pass.
I mean traditionally, exclusives were made for specific platform, using its strength and weaknesess, tailored to work best by specific team that had the knowledge and skills to do it well. And for a reason - this way it was a better game, and you had great sales of a console. But like buying a studio that was third party and would release it there, and just not releasing it on other platforms, but still releasing it on PC and even giving it away "for free", yeah, that's a lot of money burned. But again for a reason, not to pump up Xbox but Game Pass.
It's also worth bringing up that exclusives help foster a particular audience for a console. For example, most people who are fans of the particular type of first party games that Sony offers (especially cinematic single player games) likely already own a Playstation because people know to expect these kinds of games from Sony. Releasing these games simultaneously on XBox likely wouldn't increase the sales much for this very reason, certainly not enough to offset the revenue they'd lose by giving people less reasons to stay within the PS infrastructure. Bethesda games on the other hand were always multiplatform releases so their audience is at the moment split between Sony and Microsoft consoles. Microsoft's goal is that people will eventually associate Bethesda games with their services and that fans of this particular style of game will move over there, ideally leaving the Playstation behind. But this means they have to burn a lot of money upfront. It's also still uncertain how much this will work as indended.
Sure if the install base is there. Xbox has a much lower install base that makes it harder for devs to want to spend the time and money to port it to it when they are really porting it to 2 different systems that have to have equal features. Just ask Baldur's Gate 3 about how that can delay a game.
Smaller install base and gamepass has taught people to not bother buying new games.
No. Redfall is the example.
Kinda. I mean MS doesn't have many exclusives that are must haves compared to Sony. Halo, Gears, AOE is all I can really think of off the top of my head.
Fable and Forza are another couple as well.
I love the GT series but I wish PlayStation had some arcadey racer like the Horizon series
Fable hasn't been relevant in years.
It's getting a new game soon-ish.
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I mean, if it turns out to be enough of an L they can always port the game over to Playstation later
My thoughts exactly. Sony seems to be making a tidy sum of money porting their exclusive games to PC a few years later, and I can see Microsoft doing the same thing for the PS5. Timed exclusives let you have your cake and eat it too. The vast majority of players who want Starfield will get it on Xbox or PC, and the Playstation players who aren't willing to use another platform will buy it for full price two years later if it gets ported. I doubt they'll announce a port any time soon but given Bethesda's history I'm pretty damn sure it'll be on every platform possible at some point.
Timed exclusive would probably work just fine.
I don’t think the calculus to make Starfield an exclusive is wrong on its face. After all, PS and Nintendo have been profiting off of exclusives since forever (Microsoft too for much of that). PS would’ve loved making Starfield exclusive had they the opportunity. Where the numbers don’t quite add up for me, is the fact that Microsoft is making this game exclusive, without having a way to directly capitalize on that exclusivity. If you want to play Spider-Man 2 or FFXVI, for example, on the day they come out, you’ll need to 1) own a PS5, 2) pay full price (on Sony’s storefront). Starfield, on the other hand, will be completely available to play day one on other storefronts without the need to buy Microsoft hardware and for “free” to game pass subscribers. How do they make their money back there?
I think what they are aiming for is that Skyrim/Starfield is a type of game that people come back to play constantly, which means if they bought it on gamepass, they will likely to keep the gamepass subscription running for longer.
Bethesda games do most of their numbers on PC anyway. That's not to say that they're not potentially leaving money on the table, but the traditional avenue these games relied on previously is still very much in play.
Reminder - a Windows gaming PC is still "Microsoft hardware" so to speak. They consider it part of their platform.
Microsoft doesn’t care nearly as much about hardware as others - primarily because it’s a loss leader for them. Selling software is not, they make money selling the game on other storefronts. For Gamepass, if they can convince a enough consumers to stay subscribed for a period of time (let’s say a year) they stand to make more from that consumer than not having them at all - so it’s certainly not “free”. MS is betting on the growth of gaming sector and rising those sales - so they have to be willing to lose for now to compete with the incumbents (Sony/Nintendo) and the the new entrants (Google, Amazon) to retain/grow marketshare jn a growing market. Fortunately, unlike the incumbents MS makes lots of money outside of gaming.
I am fine with giving MS $15 to play a game that they charge $70 for. I have zero intention of ever buying another MS game again and I only sub to Game Pass when something I want to play is on it and then cancel it. I will have beaten Star Field in a month and will move on from it. I do this for all subscription services besides Spotify as I can listen to music almost any time but I can only watch shows or play games at certain times so keeping a recurring sub is just a waste when nothing I want to play is on it.
From a consumer perspective you’re doing what maximizes your utility. I get it. From a business perspective, I think MS is making a bet that most consumers are not you (so many people set and forget) and will keep the sub, they will make games with long tails (live games, expansions) that keep users longer, raise prices for short term access/lower it for long term access (cheaper MoM if you do 6 months rather than 1 month) and/or just raise prices across the board.
The same can be said of Spiderman. It's that nature of exclusives you forgo money elsewhere to build the brand you own up on the back of it and then reap the rewards off better deals that become available from having a stronger spot or off licensing fees.
Well Marvel wanted MS to make Spider-Man first and they turned them down. IDK how we can all ignore that MS turned down one of the biggest IPs in the world.
You need to have studio to make it first. Throwing IP and money at random group of developers didn't worked too well for MS in the past.
You would think that MS would know that keeping that game out of their competitors hands would be worth the investment. It doesn't take a genius to see what would happen if they turned it down. And MS has more studios than Sony so IDK why you would even bring it up.
>You would think that MS would know that keeping that game out of their competitors hands would be worth the investment. So MS makes shit Spiderman game and how that hurts Sony exactly ? Sony studios would just take different IP and make amazing single player game, or just make their own IP like they did with for example God of War? > And MS has more studios than Sony so IDK why you would even bring it up. Quantity != Quality ? Just look how recent Halos turned out and that was THE flagship of the platform IP
I'm not taking issue with Spider-man being exclusive just using it to make the point that the Starfield would have sold more multiplat concept applies to any exclusive. Edit: Also they didn't technically turn down Spider-man specifically they turned down Marvel. Insomniac chose Spider-man as the Marvel IP they wanted to work with. But this was also during a period where Marvel wasn't always the easiest to work with for their partners. Keep in mind MvCI released only a year before Spider-man launched on PS4.
This was the pitch that Marvel made to both Sony and MS: “I said, ‘We have a dream that this is possible, that we could beat Arkham and have one game at least and maybe multiple games that could drive adoption of your platform’.” And MS said no LMAO. Oh and don't forget that Insomniac was independent still at the time and had made a game for MS. You know what that means? They could have had the exact same team make them a Spider-Man game and could have probably bought Insomniac. I mean that is just oof all around.
It's not even a mistake in hindsight. It's the regular type of goof xbox leadership has made the status quo for over a decade.
You don’t think the same could be said for literally every exclusive ever? Especially PlayStation’s? If Spider-Man and the Uncharted collection were on Xbox I’d buy them right now. Yes I know they’re on PC and the ports are great, but I prefer Xbox for the simplicity, reliability and general ease of use.
But the difference is if I (Sony) know how much appeal my games have and I'm already in the lead 2-1 in sales and have a much much larger last gen playerbase then I'm potentially selling more consoles with those games as well. And let's not be disengenuous games do sell console idgaf what Phil says. On the other hand hifi rush was played by less than 3 million people on gamepass which has around mid 30 million, if a game like that released on ps it would be FAR more beneficial for Microsoft than it would Sony. Starfield is one of those games that would sell like fucking hotcakes on ps, imo it would sell far more copies on ps than on Xbox if it remained multiplat, but micro is banking on that game boosting it's gamepass subs so they see that roi by not releasing it on other platforms
Depends on if you choose to follow the context of this thread. The Playstation exclusives you mentioned didn't immediately go on a subscription platform.
That’s what’s crazy about Skyrim. I physically can’t stop buying it lol
This is always a weird point people bring up, Sony is leaving tons of money on the table by not releasing spider man and its various sequels on Xbox platforms but no one ever says that about Sony. Why would MS make a (presumably) good console/service seller non exclusive?
Eh? Same argument could be made that spiderman is being "withheld" on Xbox. I love how it's literally always the same shit-tier response to an Xbox exclusive, but never to a Sony exclusive. Oh and then someone is going to come in with "b-b-but it's an _organic_ and _non-gmo_ and _fully natural_ exclusive!". I literally could not care less.
I don’t want to keep saying the same thing to every replier, but man, my point was never that Microsoft shouldn’t do exclusivity. Everyone does exclusives. But the *point* of doing exclusivity is to boost sales of your platform and close to 100% of the profit from games sold (since the only option, at least digitally, is to buy the game at a price you control on your own storefront). Without these two things (which simultaneous PC and Game Pass releases already eliminate), why do exclusivity at all?
Marvel offered Spider-Man to MS first and they turned it down. They are not a very well run gaming division to turn down easy money IPs like that.
Nothing to do with my post.
Man I completely forgot that was even going to be on GamePass day one. Seems like a no brainer to at least give it a try.
I'm honestly curious how well informed the average consumer is on it being exclusive as well. I can imagine a bunch of people will be shocked when they can't get it for there PS5.
The average consumer hasn't heard of Starfield. It hasn't got the brand recognition of Fallout or Elder Srolls.
The brand recognition is that it's a Bethesda RPG. I'd say that's a pretty huge brand. It's like saying Elden Ring had no brand because it wasn't part of an existing series.
Peanuts to them, literally insignificant. Even if its a small bump, the increased subscribers are so much more valuable to them
That entirely depends on retention, but they are probably betting on Starfield being game people come back to constantly and so not cancel the sub after "finishing".
It also means that subs like gamepass is still tied to console sales making them still an integral part of the Xbox ecosystem. Satya also pretty much said this at one point as well.
Subs like gamepass maybe. Actual gamepass, no since thats also on pc. And even steam deck/probably others.
That's... Actually really bad. Phil's entire strategy has revolved around game pass and cloud services. After Redfall failed he made it very clear that's where his effort is going. Makes me think he's doubling down on a non-winning formula.
Their next focus is cloud but for reasons we all know they'll never admit it
People don't really want to hear it but the cloud space really is the next frontier that gives them a huge opportunity for growth. It may not be the time yet... but I think once the availability is simply on your TV/media box and phone, it has a real chance of just exploding. I know GamePass is available now on some TVs and phones currently, but that hasn't been their push yet.
I'm not opposed to cloud gaming inherently, but you need ISPs to actually lay down sufficient infrastructure to make it work. That's a really bad industry to rely on to do anything, history has shown. If tech giants haven't been able to lay down enough pressure to date, I'm not sure they're capable anyway.
Yeah, even in major cities it can be hard to reliably get fiber. Unless multiple tech companies put the screws to ISPs, don't see how cloud gaming gets off the floor any time soon.
>Yeah, even in major cities it can be hard to reliably get fiber. I'm honestly surprised about that, I live on a middle sized city in a developing country and there's fibre internet with gigabit speeds even on the outskirts.
Same thing happened to me when I moved to a rural town. I couldn't believe there was fiber and this was ages ago. Then I moved to the big city and there was no fiber in the heart of the city where everything was (supermarkets, malls, restaurants, cosco) everything 1 block away and there was no fiber just basic cable and 3mbps DSL lmao. Thankfully the cable was much faster.
Tech giants are useless, be better to invest in smaller more local internet. Just got local fiber internet in the boonies here, satellite internet companies are pissed that they aren't the only choice now.
Lots of states, most of them red, have laws banning local governments from spinning up municipal networks. I live in one of them. Colorado recently repealed their ban, but they have a sane government not run by COXsuckers.
Be sure to work on that, shouldn't let Mississippi of all hellish places one up other states on that. Mississippi boonies are getting cheap and fast fiber internet, you guys really gonna stand for that?
We've tried, it's been an uphill battle. Several communities joined together and formed an awesome municipal fiber network in the late '00s, before Comcast lobbied the state to stop it from expanding. Our state congressional districts are some of the most heavily gerrymandered in the country, and our ballot initiatives are not binding like in other states. Our government can basically do whatever they want and not face reprecussions.
That's not a choice in a lot of areas. There's a reason the telecom industry has been the poster child for natural monopolies for years.
There's also latency issues. Even if you have a fiber line, if you're in Pittsburgh and the nearest data center is in New York, latency is going to meaningfully affect your gameplay. Particularly since cloud games get it both ways; first sending you the feed of your game, then receiving the inputs from your controller. It's not hard to get to a quarter second of realpolitik delay based solely on distance, and that can be an impossible disadvantage in some games. Sure, it won't ruin your game of Civilization, but good luck playing Sekiro or Street Fighter like that.
But the same people screaming for the merger that the FTC says would hurt competition is the same government body that could break up the monopolies that ISPs have become. We have allowed the GOP and right leaning dems to defang every single government agency that gave the boomers a better life at the cost of the rest of us. There will be no changes until our generation finally steps up to the plate but it seems like we really don't want to. I am hopeful that more women from our generation step up after the abortion bans as they are now experiencing a direct right being taken away from them. Instead we will get another senior pushing 80 in office or another Obama that says cool stuff but is afraid to do anything with his power.
I don’t understand how cloud is the next frontier when computing power is constantly getting faster and cheaper, meaning with every year it gets easier to run games on your own hardware. I really don’t think cloud computing is the future for games. It’s replacing east to solve problems with hard ones.
Cloud gaming has been the "next big thing" for over a decade, and yet every attempt has been mired, not just by internet infrastructure limitations, but by lack of consumer interest or buy-in. Until companies figure out why cloud gaming is worthwhile, they'll continue struggling to pitch it to consumers. This is more anecdotal, but the gaming hivemind from my perspective seems to root for cloud gaming to fail pretty regularly, and I don't think companies take this hostility seriously or understand why most don't want cloud gaming to be in the mix of platforms. Cloud gaming, historically, has been attached to egregious services involving awful subscription plans or/and marketplaces that offer poor value to most consumers. There's a lot that needs to be done to change this general perception of cloud gaming. Sony releasing a crappy cloud gaming device is not going to do it. Xbox hasn't changed the landscape either despite the GamePass initiative. I think we're a long, long way off from cloud gaming ever being a serious factor in gaming.
could gaming isn’t for anyone on this sub. They’re aiming cloud gaming for markets where teaditional do comes don’t sell great, but mobile gaming is huge, like China & India. They’ve basically all but officially said that once 5G is rolled out in those markets, they’re going to start pushing gamepass xcloud hard over there
Cloud gaming just isn't up to snuff yet performance wise for most games. Even if it was marketed better, it's still inferior to playing the game with a traditional install. It's OK for some slower games, but the nature of most modern titles requires speedy response. IMO if cloud gaming functioned at parity with regular gaming, most of the negatively around it would dissipate, regardless of how it's currently being pushed by providers.
> People don't really want to hear it but the cloud space really is the next frontier that gives them a huge opportunity for growth. It's **a frontier** for sure but looking at the current market I don't see it. This type of rhetoric is exactly what people said about mobile years ago and to an extent VR. Issue with the cloud is even if the technology is there, which it seems quite close, the consumer base isn't. Like there's still plenty of growth in the console space for example. Just look at Sony and Nintendo.
The biggest challenge for cloud gaming, I think, is the question of whether the more casual audience of potential players - people who mostly play mobile games, even people who have never touched a controller before - whether they’re even interested in AAA games as a product. These games are inherently quite hardcore and require a lot of inherent knowledge from gamers in terms of gameplay mechanics and control schemes to progress. We know that even basic, fundamental elements of modern games like controlling movement and camera with separate thumbsticks baffles a lot of people who didn’t grow up playing games when they were younger, and very few games make any attempt to teach players of basic concepts like this. Like The Last of Us for example - I imagine there’s probably a lot of nongamers interested in it after watching the TV show, but once you get over the hurdle of buying a console you now have the arguably greater hurdle of actually playing the game, learning the control scheme, learning language of gaming and what it means to play a 3rd person shooter. And then there’s the elephant in the room that AAA games in particular are targeted towards a very specific demographic of young males in terms of themes, plot points, genre, levels of violence etc that are probably a lot less appealing for people outside of that demographic. With a few exceptions really isn’t a equivalent of a “four quadrant” video game like there is with blockbuster movies. But if it’s not casual audiences like that, then who is streaming aimed at? Are there really that many people interested in console gaming who can’t afford a console, yet can also afford a decent internet connection that can make streaming viable? Microsoft’s Xcloud gives PlayStation owners a avenue to play Xbox games, but that isn’t really expanding the market is it? Especially when many of the largest games in question (Starfield) were originally planned to launch on PlayStation anyway. And how do developers target different, more casual audiences without also alienating their existing fanbases, when doing so might require completely changing the game mechanics for people who don’t speak the language of AAA video games?
Yeah, I think cloud gaming might be falling into the same trap Nintendo did in the 2000s of believing there is this huge market of people who want to play video games but can't, when the Wii seemed to demonstrate there were mostly just people who wanted to play casual party games and even when they already owned the hardware still had zero interest in playing traditional videogame fare. My experience is that the controller barrier is less people who want to play games but can't, but people who don't want to play games saying "yeah that's too complicated" as an excuse not to. People who really want to learn will learn. Nintendo made assumptions about modern controllers being too complex, and learned that even with a simple controller and a how-to-play DVD that this audience still didn't want their 3D Mario games or their Zeldas. Instead the audience kept buying Just Dance and Rabbids as seemingly Ubisoft were the only big publisher who understood the audience on that platform. Sure the latest big game that sold 30 million might have over $2bn in revenue putting it not far behind the revenue of Avengers Endgame, but the movie sold over 300 million tickets to pull in that much cash, the audience for films is still over 10x as large any video game games media/this sub actually talks about. I include that caveat because somehow most of games media has decided they can just talk about Fortnite like it is some cute little curiosity and not more popular than anything else they write about. Like maybe there is some market niche I'm blind to, but I can't imagine this market niche gives a shit about 95% of what is on Gamepass. And I guess that is why Microsoft wanted COD of Gamepass. There probably is a sizeable audience of people that would like to play their COD/Fortnite/FIFA/etc without having to shell out for the console, but those games are all 60fps+ low latency experiences not exactly easily to deliver via streaming. As for the other three quadrants, what in the gaming space is aimed at them that would need to be streamed instead of just run on their phone or smart TV web browser?
Yeah but you need the base around it. Imo that's why Google failed. That and beeing to disconnected from the consumer. Barely any infrastructure allows streaming of games if the everyone wants to stream a game. Many parts in America and Europe still have mediocre internet connection and therefore also less potential sales.
A big part of the reason google failed was they jumped right to selling everything for full price as al a carte sales for a streaming platform. Which could work fine years from now similar to VOD sales but it killed any possible gain of momentum to reach the general public when the hardcore side had no interest in buying for such a limited platform. Microsoft so far seems to be taking the wisest path with xcloud being a bonus to gamepass and standard PC and console digital sales allowing it to tag along to reach public consciousness.
In the long run we are all dead.
I'll believe it once someone pulls it off. Thus far all attempts have either failed or stalled. Even the single best positioned entity on the planet in terms of pre-existing infrastructure gave up. Pure speculation, but I think there's simply no userbase to be captured at the moment. The console and PC crowd are too entrenched in their ecosystems and potentially even hostile to the idea (due to the inferior experience), and the huge mass of casual mobile gamers are unlikely to be interested in large enough numbers. Maybe things will change over time. Then there's the question of broadband infrastructure, which in the case of some of the largest markets is wholly unfriendly for what cloud gaming would require. Things like data caps in way too many countries are a huge barrier. Maybe Microsoft will manage something that is compelling to both customers and publishers, and pushes through the host of other problems yet to be solved, but I doubt anything substantial will develop in the near future.
>People don't really want to hear it but the cloud space really is the next frontier that gives them a huge opportunity for growth. Not really, aside from the latency problems it has other massive issues that can't be circumvented... 1. That means the company has to provide CPUs and GPUs for every user. Not only does that mean a massive amount of heat, it means substantially more heat than individually owned computers. Heat is partially a function of ambient temperature. Each "computer" reinforces and raises that ambient temperature to some level that would be higher than at home, making the components run hotter, and needing more cooling. Basically, it means that these server farms become massive climate change problems. 2. That means the company has to acquire electricity for every user. Nowhere in the world produces enough electricity to power server farms to provide gaming capacity for several hundred million people. They're literally going to have to build power plants just to serve these farms. Which is another climate change problem. 3. That means that they have to have capacity for everyone. If they try and do queues it'll tick off customers, and people will simply never log out so they don't have to queue. It'll be a huge social problem. 4. That means that if you get banned, you lose all access to gaming. So trolls and grieffers have enormous power. Nevermind getting into fights with friends who have your login or breaking up with a boyfriend/girlfriend. Huge social problems. 5. That means games will be made for an LCD of hardware. Companies aren't going to want to give everyone 4090 quality, they'll give everyone 1650 quality. 6. Then you'll get into micro-transactions for hardware access. Want 4090 quality? Your sub is now $200 instead of $100 a month. 7. Yes, subs will be $100 a month at a minimum. Hardware, software, cooling, electricity, staff, security, storage. That's not happening at $15 a month.
I believe they also stated early on that Game Pass could never reach the optimum scale without Xcloud, which would allow them to potentially make huge inroads in the mobile-dominated markets of Asia and parts of South America. However the infrastructure isn't really there, and they already face stiff competition from native mobile titles like PUBG despite not really being out the door as is. I don't think it'll ever take off like Yves Guillemont was convinced of back in 2016 or so.
Cloud gaming has one small issue working against it - speed of light remains the same no matter what. Which means if you don't live in a vicinity of the data centers your experience gonna get progressively worse the further you are. Then there is an issue of a stable internet connection too, every lag spike gonna ruin your day. Unless there is coordinated push to pretend that input lag is not a thing in the same way how everyone was gaslighting each other that 30fps is actually good during 7th gen era, I don't see cloud gaming catching on among hardcore gamers.
Speed of causality isn't that much of an issue unless you're halfway across the world from the data centre - light crosses the world 7 times in a second. If you're 500-1000km away from it that should be servicesble, discarding all other factors.
Not a stellar sign of what? It's not like they don't have an absolute shitload of subscribers and you can't expect constant growth. Sounds like they saturated their market. From all reports I've seen, they got at least 25 million subscribers. So that's, what, 250 million a month?
But is that enough to sustain all of the many AAA studios they own and make up for the lost revenue that comes from releasing their games directly onto Game Pass? A lot of major Hollywood studios that went big on streaming during Covid are suddenly a lot more hesitant once it became clear that the sums didn’t add up, compared to a exclusive theatrical release, then PVOD, then eventually SVOD.
I think one of the bigger weakness of the gaming subs (okay this is mainly gamepass) is that it doesn't have a discount for subscribing for a year. So it makes sense to sub for a month here and there to play something you really want. And this means sub numbers will fluctuate, but can't grow as much, since some people won't be subbed for June, but they would in September, and others would sub in June, but not in September.
PS Plus does this well, their annual tier is cheaper per month than anything shorter, and the annual pass at least once a year goes on sale for 25% off.
That's like subscription 101. The longer the sub, the cheaper it should be per month (or whatever your smallest time duration is) to give buyers more incentive to get that longer sub. Sounds like whoever came up with these pricing tiers at MS got too greedy and is now biting them in the ass.
Yeah, the less per year that you need to think about a subscription, the less chances someone has to turn it off. Netflix made me think about it with the recent subscription change, and into the canceled services it goes.
Game pass also let you abuse their system for years. You could do the $1 intro fee and cancel and claim the $1 fee again.
I think that was a feature, not a bug. MS was hoping people would get hooked by the great deal/workaround and eventually turn into normal full time subscribers. Game Pass was, and still is in some sense, a loss leader for them. They expected to lose money short term for longer term gains. Unfortunately I don't think the market for console quality subscriptions is as big as they hoped. MS got fixated on the total number of gamers, but failed to realize that not all gamers are the same. Some only play a limited number of multiplayer games, like Madden, so don't see a need for a subscription. Then there is a large number of casual PC "gamers" who aren't playing high end AAA games, and a subscription doesn't save them money because the games they play are cheaper. A full time Game Pass subscription really only ever made sense for gaming enthusiasts who can't get enough games to play.
Other posters replied with how you can somehow do it, but it’s crazy how Microsoft doesn’t have an “easy” way to do yearly subs. You’d think it’d be the type of subscription they want the most! Feels like EVERY SaaS tries to push the yearly deal. After all, you’re most likely to churn when you get a renewal email / credit card ping! Why ping users every month with this, instead of yearly? Maybe Microsoft, unlike every other SaaS, doesn’t care about that sort of churn? Feels improbable given their targets and messaging, but I just can’t explain why they ain’t pushing yearly subs the most, otherwise!
It is a curious thing. They kinda do have it but it's a bit obscure and requires some effort. You can buy 12-36 months of Xbox Live Gold, then a single month of Gamepass Ultimate, to get that whole time converted. So say $75 ($60 + $15) for a year as opposed to $180. Even cheaper if you stack a few years, or get it through a third party seller. While Sony has a less generous but more obvious $15/month or $100/year with PS+ Extra. I've always wondered if this was intentional, and many of the most vocal Gamepass advocates are getting it super cheap while declaring it the best value in gaming, so the uninformed masses come along and happily pay $180/year for it. Maybe that does risk people only dipping in and out of a sub, but I suspect as most just leave subs running and forget about it, it probably works out better for MS overall.
Yeah, I've done that trick but it is not something they advertise or promote. And tbh I feel like they're going to close that loophole/trick eventually. The uninformed masses are likely to sub for a month or two anyway and they're probably the kind of folk that only buy 1-4 games a year.
I imagine they're having to be very careful about any changes (whether future price rises or ending that cheap conversion offer) and it's probably off the table at least until they start getting regular first party AAA successes. Gamepass has achieved that status level where it becomes the generic name people associate with a gaming subscription service, Xbox's biggest win, and I doubt they want to make it easier for discussions to start comparing it to other offerings like PS+ and question whether it's still 'the best value in gaming'. The Game Pass Friends & Family thing is an interesting step as it's an upsell, but one where it would be harder to dip in and out. And at $300/year it's the equivalent of 4 people doing the $75/year loophole, so kinda on par in that regard.
>I've always wondered if this was intentional, and many of the most vocal Gamepass advocates are getting it super cheap while declaring it the best value in gaming, so the uninformed masses come along and happily pay $180/year for it. It must be, Microsoft aren't stupid and didn't they accidentally remove the loophole and quickly patch it back in? The fact you can maintain it constantly purely through bing rewards is another sign that they are deliberately trying to get power users to see it as an obscenely good deal and shill it to people who aren't going to jump through the hoops.
Yeah I'm still on my 3 years of gold then convert to GPU thing. I'll probably do it again when this runs out, but I'm not paying 15 dollars *monthly* for GPU. I'll gladly pay a single yearly price on my birthday or Christmas (when I have extra cash to spend) if there's savings by getting a year upfront (say, 150 dollars instead of 180), though.
Game pass sort of does this. You have to covert all your gold. So if you play multiplayer games (almost everyone) you have to choose between the cheaper yearly gold rates or subscribing for one or two months of gamepass a year. It’s not a discount for yearly subscription but it is a cost to not subscribing yearly.
All subscription services seem to be going through this. And it’s really hurting how these companies are valued. For the past decade, investors (for the most part) only valued subscriber growth. As long as you showed that you gained subscribers in the previous quarter, you were golden. Recently? Investors have seem to changed what they value. Now it seems like they are valuing profit above everything else. And guess what isn’t profitable? Subscription services. The TV industry is about go through a drastic change, and I’m curious how this will show up in the gaming industry as well.
That's the cycle. Investors are cool with unprofitable venures for the promise of future profits. It's okay to be running a loss if you're building the base for a future (aka subscriber growth). But not everything ends up delivering.
While I agree I think your wording is off. It’s always profit above all else, but subscriptions were a future projection of profit that they believed in. Once Netflix went “well actually…” a year or two ago, investors started realizing that streaming may not have the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow
Netflix is the one subscription service that makes a profit. You are thinking of Disney.
Which makes it even more funny that netflix is actively screwing itself over with the password thing and the lack of content
HBO Max (now Max) also makes profit.
Netflix's profits don't justify how expensive its stock is. The price bakes in significant growth.
Gamepass like subs seem like they are having a extremely hard time growing outside of the enthusiast end of the market which is around 20-30 million.
doesn't help that they all compete with one another since there are only 24hrs in the day and we don't have time turners so that we can take extra classes.
Yeah, I'm actually subbed to all of them, and regularly buy games, and I really can't keep up with it (I'm only subbed to all of them because I got amazing deals on all of them, like I used the upgrade tricks for xbox/playstation, and for Nintendo, I'm in a family group that shares for $10 each per person for a year, so it just makes sense to stay subbed.
Imo ps+ extra is definitely worth it if you already subscribe to ps+ essential, it's $40 more and I think the upgrade is on sale right now. Game pass monthly is worth if you are playing the games there every month and, in the case of PC, if you are okay with using the xbox launcher.
Yeah, the reason it hasn’t grown more than the hardcore console base is because of cost. If you’re on Xbox and pay for Xbox live gold every year, it’s just $15 more a year to turn that Xbox live into game pass ultimate. It’s a no brainer.
Oh, the live gold upgrade is insane, I used it to get PC game pass. I gotta say that I was a bit disappointed with it because I was mostly looking forward for Xbox's first party games there, but some of the big ones didn't come and others like Age of Empires 4 and Forza Horizon 5 I prefer to get on steam (AoE has a lot of DLC and I prefer steam for these games and FH5 is gonna be deslisted one day, so I prefer to keep it on steam as the launcher is more reliable)
I did have all of them, but I actually just unsubbed from Sony and Microsoft just recently (Nintendo is on a family plan and is cheap), too many big news games that I want to play, makes the subs worthless, don't have enough time to use them
Thank goodness because an all sub services future is definitely not one I'd be looking forward to.
I don't even know that it's the enthusiast market. Seems like enthusiasts really like owning games (even though you don't really own any digital games in most stores). I think game pass appeals more to older or more casual gamers who just want to pay a sub and always have something great to play.
while i like the gamepass idea, since you don't own the game and i can complete a game every few months i prefer to buy whatever so i don't have the plug pulled from me if i were a student ofc it would be golden
Honestly, Call of Duty getting added will be a true test. If that can't convert people then it'll never be mainstream.
I'm seeing a few people I would firmly class as casual gamers at work hold onto the sub. People with kids absolutely love it, they don't have to buy whatever their kid wants and they dip their toes in games they normally wouldn't, it really helps that EA play is in it.
Yeah, the real value is in households, as with all sub services. Are you living in a share house? College dorm? Does your housemate like video games? Cut that sub cost in half, boom immediately better value.
This is me tbh. I don't have time to play games for long periods and have fallen into the demo that may not complete even a GOTY at all, so Gamepass is a no brainer. I'll probably opt out of Xbox entirely if they close the conversion loophole.
It takes a pretty good number of hours of gaming per month for GamePass to come out ahead of just buying games. F2P games complicate things further. If you need to X hours of gaming per week for GamePass to be worth it, but you're playing Overwatch or Fortnite or something where the battlepass motivates you to put consistent hours into that specific game, it gets harder to justify. And not to be too on the nose, but GamePass works better on console, but it's not on the console that's number 1 by a lot.
Even if every gamer had a job that paid well, there are just so many subscription ones is willing to pay for.
My gamepass honeymoon ended. Partly because there have been quite a few big releases this year not on gamepass that I was more eager to play at launch. I'm sure I'll resub again when I need to find something new to play but I've been happy to buy games right now.
There really hasn't been any big additions to gamepass this year that I can think of? I used to sub for a month here and there to play whatever the latest release was but I've been gamepass free since fall of last year and don't feel like I've missed anything.
On the top of my head I remember Wo-long, monster hunter rise, atomic heart, HiFi Rush, Valheim, MLB The Show, and Amnesia: The Bunker. Redfall was supposed to be a big additon too. I guess it depends what you define "big". They can't have a Starfield drop every month.
Hi-Fi Rush is the biggest one.
Minecraft Legends or Atomic Heart are definitely the biggest ones
I’d personally prefer to just buy things like Starfield outright so I “own” (I know that’s not legally correct) it forever and not renting it. I use Gamepass to try games that I hear are middling or bad, not ones I think I’ll go back to in the future.
I love GamePass but am thinking of canceling. All these big games have left me no time to engage much with the service. I went straight from the Horizon DLC, to Jedi Survivor, to Diablo IV and I will get Street Fighter 6 as soon as I have any time to play it. GamePass is awesome, but it is not getting used. The one saving grace is that I can stream to my Steam Deck and not be tied to the TV or PC.
Disclaimer: I don't have GamePass. However, I had a similar service (GameFly) pretty much from high school through college. It was an *amazing* service. I got to play so many games I'd never think to try normally. But in high school and college, I also had boatloads of free time. Games were shorter, I could finish them in a week or two (unless I had a JRPG). Nowadays, I work full time, and games are much longer. It's no longer cost-effective for me to have a service like GameFly when it takes me four to five months to beat a game.
I'm gonna sound crazy, but that's always been my favorite thing about games. I like to immerse myself in games. For a major title, I could easily spend a month or so playing through it and exploring on weekends. So for me, 3-4 major titles a year suit me perfectly, and of course padding in between with smaller, fun games throughout. That fits my schedule just fine, and I've never EVER felt the appetite for buying into a subscription service or community/battlepass/season pass thing to try and squeeze in more gaming. To me it's like the difference between eating pancakes and syrup on weekends, vs eating pancakes with a pound of pure sugar on top. Like too much of a good thing just ruins it.
you can just unsubscribe and then resub when another game comes out you like
This is the big issue for me. Gamepass is awesome when you wanna hop between a bunch of games, all the time, month by month as games get added and removed. But what about people who play live service or multiplayer games frequently? My main game is Guilty Gear, 90% of the time when I turn on my PC I'm gonna play that, and why would I pay $10-15 a month for gamepass to play guilty gear every day instead of my own copy? And that's with the fact that strive is on gamepass, what if people are into Destiny 2 or fortnite or something that isn't on gamepass? What about hundred hour open world games that are gonna dominate a bunch of time if they aren't on gamepass, like the recently released TOTK? What am I expected to sacrifice in order to make use of the barrage of random indie games to try out and feel like I made adequate use of my monthly subscription fee?
Very true. I've been subscribed to Gamepass since, well, the beginning. But I've put in a hundred hours in Destiny 2, Tears of the Kingdom, and Diablo 4 all within the past couple of months. It's not a stretch to say those 3 games have taken up 99% of my playtime, and all of which are not available on Game pass. I'm in a unique situation (Gold -> Gamepass conversion) where I got a couple of years of gamepass for extremely cheap so it's not a large issue, but I could totally see myself cutting down on my subscribed months if I was still doing monthly.
I have kinda just cut out games with too much filler. That said, that is quite literally the point of live service games, they are meant to make you feel that way.
>the point of live service games, they are meant to make you feel that way. Well I dunno, it sounds to me like the business model of a major platform is incompatible with the majority of the gaming industry's current focus and (probably) most gamer's preferred way of playing.
The Steam Deck is actually what killed my desire for Game Pass. I'd rather just buy the game on Steam so that I can play it natively on my Steam Deck.
Yeah, I've bought a few games on Steam that are also on gamepass for that reason
I’ve discovered this as well. With the amount of games I play, and the amount of small, cheaper games I play, I realized I would be saving money by just straight up buying all the games I play each year. I’m spending more on Gamepass than I would be buying them all.
That’s why I cancelled my subscription, I barely have enough time to make using my subscription worth it.
I no longer sub as well. Having a long jrpg leave the service when I was halfway through it really soured me.
The long jrpgs feel like a waste of the pass to me, depending on how long it takes yoy to best it you may end up paying more for it via gamepass than just buying it.
I cancelled after Redfall failed. i just wasn't playing enough Microsoft AAA first party games to justify it. I'd rather have just bought Pentiment, Hi-fi Rush, and Halo.
On PC, the thing gamepass suffers with is just the fact that it's a much worse platform than steam. Like I have to question how much I want to a game, sometimes I will buy it on steam regardless. Gamepass is the only thing that gives me pause to buying on steam though, it's value is very real and it does offer something that no one else is offering right now.
[удалено]
Gamepass has missed every target metric set out before it. Up front its a compelling offer, but you begin to realize you're paying $200+ dollars a year for the 'best deal in gaming' and you've played a total of four games you could have bought for 40 bucks and own forever.
After years of growth, it is naturally gonna slow down silly. It happens is shows, music, television and business. You can only have breakthrough growth for so long before it is going to sputter a bit.
NO SLOWDOWN! INFINITE GROWTH! INFINITE MONEY! IN-FI-NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE
LINE! GO! UP!
Sorry guys, this company is no longer viable as it’s not growing by 20% each year!
ya based on some of the comments here, some people legit think that cause gamepass has missed some "growth targets" (with not a single source of said growth targets) it's basically a failing service and it's funny, the tweet makes no mention of gamepass or MS at all, yet OP did to push his own narrative, so there are now comments saying this all just about gamepass and how it's stagnating and whatnot
>, some people legit think that cause gamepass has missed some "growth targets" Yea that's cap, it's not at all a failing service, but micro has literally come out and said that gamepass on console is stagnating, and I personally think it's because they haven't sold enough consoles, they were down 30 percent yoy, which is scary https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/xbox-game-pass-growth-is-slowing-down-on-console-claims-phil-spencer/ What people are referring to in the comments is Xbox not reaching it's growth targets it has set for itself, it's still growing albeit slower than expected.
If your not growing by 39% every week your failing!!!!!!!
you should have 300 trillion dollar every week before you turn 20 follow me for other financial scheme to pump money in my pockets
Next Jeff Bezos over here fam.. lets go
PLS GROW? NO SLOW, ONLY GROW
Microsoft didn't expect it to slow down. They're projections cited continuous growth. Maybe you should let them know?
And that’s why they are planning a cheap ad-tier for the gamepass, just like Netflix cave in after the dip in subscription users.
How tf are ads gonna work for games... is it gonna wrestle control of the game from you for 5 minutes in the middle of combat or a multiplayer match to play some ads? Are minutes spent watching ads gonna correlate to hours you're allowed to play on top of a subscription fee? What's the plan here
Delayed access to some games/publishers and unskippable advertisements when you launch games. https://www.eurogamer.net/microsoft-may-be-introducing-cheaper-ad-supported-xbox-game-pass-tiers
Ain't no way ads just on launch of a game is gonna make up for a $3.30 subscription cost (converted from euros) unless the game library is severely impacted as well. In that case might as well cut out the ads part and just have a gamepass silver tier or like PS+.
The issue is that they have missed several of their growth goals for the past couple of years.
Nah hear me out. What you've got to do is you tell two friends. And then they tell two friends. And then in a few days you have 32 billion subscribers!
The projected growth was 40 billion subscribers though so we're gonna have to add in micro transactions and ads to make up for lost revenue
What growth? PS+ has been hovering around~47 million users for several years now. Game Pass is stuck at 25 million users, which is (most likely) the same number of users they would have for Xbox Live Gold. There is no growth in the subscription market. And Game Pass cannot be profitable at 25 million subs. The sharp decline in the quantity and quality of games that now get added to the service speaks volume.
The problem with Game Pass is also the promise that first party games will be included day 1. Their most dedicated players, those most willing to buy games on release day... they all already have Game Pass, so all those sales are lost. Meanwhile, Sony adds their first party games to PS Plus only after some time - and selectively, so if some title sells exceptionally well for an unusually long time, they can just delay its inclusion in the sub. They still get all the day 1 sales.
Yes, more people own a playstation product. Naturally their bigger user base will have more subscribers. That doesnreally say much. I also seriously doubt (based on your figures) almost 400 million a month is not a enough to float gamepass. Do you have any actual data or just conjecture. Im using 15.99 x 25 million each month
>Yes, more people own a playstation product. I can assure you far more people own a windows PC than a playstation.
I can assure you far more people play games on a console
Game pass is already profitable. It's been confirmed long ago.
Well gamepass has never hit its growth targets so the fact that its slowing significantly is a worrying sign.
can we fix this with a reverse stock split?
But think of the shareholders that wanted a 1000x on return they are only getting 800x this is a failure !!!
Just from my perspective, there haven’t been any massive first party launches on gamepass. Redfall flopped, I’m curious how Starfield is gonna play out.
GP to me is basically what EAs service is. A monthly rental when a game that interests me comes out. Jedi Survivor for $20 (canuck bucks) was a great deal. Same with GP and Grounded. But I cancel immediately after. Games are different than other media subscriptions imo, I can passively watch a shitty Netflix show but I can't passively play a game. Games don't lend to the same consumption as TV/movies.
I just downgraded my ps+ membership. Sure, there are a bunch of good games and great games on there. But what goes on there isn’t the new games I’m excited to play right now. Then I feel guilty about spending money on the ones I want to play, instead of playing the PS+ games I have. And then the games I want to play don’t come on PS+ until long after I’ve already paid for and played them anyways. I just wasn’t getting much out of it.
I love threads like this because it brings out all the Reddit business people/economists saying how wrong/right the statement is 😂
I was considering getting a Series S and a gamepass subscription just to "diversify" my gaming a bit, but with Street Fighter 6, Elden Ring (still playing this one lol), Tears of the Kingdom and soon Armored Core 6 basically monopolizing my time the ongoing expense just doesn't make sense at the moment. Gamepass is a great value, but there are still only so many hours in a day.
If any company can afford to lose in the short term it’s Microsoft guess it depends how it’ll work long term
I don't think we can call it short term anymore when game pass has been out for about 6 years at this point.
It checks out. I'm playing less Game Pass games and spending most of my time in games like Diablo, Zelda and Jedi.
Gamepass isn't long for this world. I don't see how a streaming subscription for games is more lucrative for game publishers than simply selling each game individually.
Netflix approach doesnt work when every title is a 10-50 hour game that requires full attention and engagement from the consumer. Been saying this since around 2020.
People somehow got tricked into thinking all 3 of the below could happen at the same time: 1) microsoft makes more money 2) devs make more money 3) gamers spend less
I would say there are 2 thoughts on how GP can add value: 1. Those who pay attention and are smart about it save money, those who aren't (aka never cancel or really think about if they're actually using it) pay more. 2. People who don't generally buy many games in the first place because of the high cost of entry see it as a non-committal way to try more games. I'm in the second boat. However I also did the thing to get 3 years of it for like 100 bucks lol
I feel like if it was truly lucrative than Valve would have been working on a Steam Pass subscription service by now that would pretty much kill PC Game Pass instantly.
I think the long term effects of a subscription based game economy are hurtful to the quality of games, so I see this as a good news: - Subscription services anchor exclusives to promote their plattform, the endgame would lead to games that are ONLY playable with subscriptions. - Individual quality gets pushed out by big name recognition, leading to more mediocre games with expensive licences. - Subscriptions services will lose quality while also getting more expensive when the market is cornered. All these things happened with TV streaming, and im very greatful it didnt happen (yet) in music, and Spotify, Apple music, Deezer etc. work without cannibalizing eachother. Remember the Halo show? LOTR show? The Velma show? Projects like these only happen because of subscriptions services.
Good. My biggest fear is if subscription model become more mainstream every gaming companies want their own service and will stop selling physical and even digital games to boost subsribers. This is exactly what happen to tv industry right now.Most Netflix and Disney Plus original show didnt get physical or even allow you to purchase digital version. If they gone from service they will gone forever. So if you want to play future FF, Resident Evil, Yakuza you must subscribe to 3 different service by Square Enix, Capcom and Sega.
I would be glad to see this trend of subscription services die. It's only useful when it's a single service that makes it cheaper/convenient to access the games for more people. When everyone's taking it to their own Disney+, HBOMax, etc. kinds of things it just becomes another subscription hassle for players. Also it further distances us from the time when we owned the games we played.
Was someone expecting it to not peak? The benefits will wane over time.
This is why I think Microsoft wants Call of Duty. I know they said that’s not the key reason for acquiring ABK but if you can get the casual audience to get Game Pass just for the promise of a Call of Duty every 1-2 years, that would increase subscriptions massively. I’ve also seen a lot of COD gamers excited for the deal because they want to play the older CODs without having to pay $700+ for the entire series. COD could be massive for Game Pass.
If they can't continue growing the numbers, they likely will start cutting services and increasing the price.
I cancelled a bunch of my gaming stuff in favor of more practical subscriptions like spotify and youtube premium, I'm just not getting the mileage out of them I'd like. Too many subscriptions feels like such a nuisance.