I dont think we can jump to that conclusion. While Sony’s subscription numbers dropped, their revenue from subscriptions was up. This implies they made more money per user. One interpretation of that could be enough subscribers took up Playstations higher tier offerings to completely offset the 1.9 million loss in subscribers.
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Yeah, certain chunk of people moved up to PS+ Extra for sure.
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Yes they made more revenue per user (and overall) but the point I made was that they still lost users despite launching a high profile Game Pass competitor. Revenues aren’t that important during user acquisition phase, which both services are still operating under. Their offering isn’t doing well competing at all imho, so it is odd for someone to read their results for the quarter and come away thinking the CMA’s argument was refuted somehow. Quite the opposite. These figures show Game Pass is still dominating that space. We can list all the reasons why as they are obvious to us, but that is kinda beyond the point.
It’s not Microsoft’s fault that Sony are not pushing their subscription to peer Game Pass. They have, as things stand right now, more popular franchised releases in numbers (ffs, Spider-Man and Wolverine) on top of GoW and Horizon and GT, they have the choice of launching those games in PS+ and growing that service tremendously, they could leverage this period where their competitors’ big games are still not releasing, but they choose not to. It’s their own choice. If they want to be Blockbuster, they do as they will, but they shouldn’t complain about Game Pass, and no one should be making that case for them either, it’s ridiculous.
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PS+ and Gamepass do compete with each other
But these services do not stand on equal footings
Sony themselves are to be blamed here
My observation is their Playstation Plus users went down but the actual tiers competing in a similar way to gamepass went up. Therefore Playstation now has more users in their gamepass like service than they did previously and its a substantial increase because it had to offset 1.9 million users that were spending 10$ per month while PS Plus extra is only 5$ more than the base tier PS Plus and the highest tier is 8$ more. This suggests that as a baseline they added between 2.1 million and 4.2 million subscribers to the gamepass competitive tiers.
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I’m also curious how purchase of 12 mobth subscriptions would factor in here. It’s likely lots of 12 month subs were sold in this window since the service just launched.
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Selling a 12-month subscription would not bump revenue dramatically since Sony could only claim the revenue that has actually been “earned.”
This is a bit complicated, so I’ll give an example that will hopefully clarify. Assume I buy a 12-month subscription to PS Plus for $120 on Nov. 1. Also assume Sony reports financial results on Nov. 30. Sony could only claim $10 of my subscription as revenue. The other $110 I paid is technically “deferred revenue” - meaning a customer has prepaid for a service that has not been delivered yet.
The Deferred Revenue is actually a liability for Sony (because they owe me for a service I have already paid for). Each month that passes $10 of that liability is extinguished and $10 of revenue is recognized.
So, hypothetically Sony could have sold millions of 12-month subscriptions to PS Plus, but they don’t get to recognize all those sales as accounting revenue until they have actually “earned” it.
Edit: The exact same logic applies to Xbox. But as far as I know it only sells 3-month subscription cards, so it probably has less deferred revenue on its books at any time compared to Sony.
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So, this statement is completely separated from reality.
Microsoft themselves expected the deal to close in calendar year 2023. Why would things continuing down that path as expected necessitate them having to do something unexpected like sell off Activision?
Let’s not over-react here. Sure the CMA stuff is BS, but overall things are progressing according to expectations MS laid out at the start of the acquisition.
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Whats this? God of War Ragnarock is driving console sales this holiday and demonstrating that Playstation can stand just fine on their own without Call of Duty 
Not that it matters because COD will be hoping to Playstation, but more fuel for Xbox and Microsoft against EC and CMA.
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The CMA stuff could put a complete halt to the deal though. They were expecting to close the deal this year, it’s looking like it won’t. It’s definitely taking longer than they expected.
They were not expecting to close this year, rather MS set a timeline to close the deal by end of fiscal year 2023 (which ends on June 30th, 2023).
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Microsoft has always said 2023.
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I can’t read, my bad. I could definitely see it being delayed further with all this.
Still don’t like this deal in general, it’s a money maker for Xbox maybe but they really aren’t gaining much in the way of talent as so many of the good creatives in the company have left.
Who is making all these CoDs and Overwatch and Diablo then? 
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Wow I have heard it all now… ABK has no talent…
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Woah catching up on 3 days of comments and there was some that were really off.
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Game Pass and PlayStation Plus Extra and higher compete, they both offer a games catalogue that you can play while you are subscribed.
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Game Pass grows and Playstation Plus decreases means little in the grand scheme of things because Game Pass is only at 25m~ users while Playstation Plus is almost double that, but we don’t know the numbers for each tier.
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Microsoft buying ABK does not suddenly guarantee them 1st place or even second place, especially if COD is still on all platforms. I would argue that there wouldn’t be such a huge shift to Xbox because of COD on game pass or early beta access to the point Sony loses a 2:1 lead and is dropped to a 2:1 loss.
People need to remember Sony must be so damaged by this deal that it is not possible for them to compete. Meaning Sony would have to lose a 2:1 market lead AND do worse than a 2:1 market loss because Xbox is still here with a 2:1 market loss. A 2:1 sales loss does not mean you can’t compete.
- Phase 2 investigations were going to happen world wide and I don’t think Microsoft thought otherwise, Plan A would have been made around knowing that all regions would hit Phase 2 so this is not a shock at all and it would be if it didn’t. Microsoft’s timeframe would have this all built in as well so seeing things go into phase 2 doesn’t throw a wrench into the bucket (heh) timeframe wise, not saying there can’t be delays but Microsoft would be urging on the cautious side with timeframes.
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What creativity and quality have any of those games or devs shown in years? Overwater 2 didn’t flip but it didn’t really succeed either, Diablo 3 was mediocre, WoW has been awful for years. CoD is a yearly sports release at this point, mid but for its fan base they will buy it cause it’s all they play.
Those two services had merged. Remember?
Talent isn’t a matter of your opinion about the games. You don’t produce multiple billion dollar franchises without talent.
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