I was an Xbox player long before Game Pass & I’ve always been on the fence regarding the logic in putting a video game rental service at the forefront of the Xbox brand (to the point of becoming overbearing IMO) & the recent trends in gaming have simply solidified my prior concerns.
Games aren’t movies. They require a time commitment & preference for the type of game on offer. I think GP’s current numbers are almost miraculous tbh considering what’s on the service but I do not want to see Game Pass overtake the Xbox console as the primary focus, especially when it’s multiplatform due to its PC push. I don’t play games on PC, mobile or when I’m brushing my teeth. The ‘play anywhere’ mantra means nothing to me considering I bought an Xbox console specifically to play on that.
I get my comment won’t be popular among some but Xbox is for me is a game console. Not a service. I think Phil Spencer has tied his future & the future of the brand to a service which requires constant quality content which so far Xbox has struggle to achieve. They admit as much themselves. It’s ironic because the Series X console is absolutely fantastic but it’s almost absent now from the online discourse.
It’s not like Xbox won’t produce great games anymore because of what he said. If anything, it’s a safe bet to proven wrong with that statement than say otherwise. I mean imagine no growth after Starfield becomes Game of the Generation. Great to be proven wrong for the better, not for the worst.
Good post, I also think that alot of casual gamers out there aren’t interested in subscribing as they only want to play a few games a year anyway. Because of these reasons there’s a limit to how much gamepass can grow and I think they won’t get to 50 million for at least 10 year if that but the amount of money they have pouring in will always mean that there are good games to play. They do need to market third party games not coming to game pass though because that will help with mindshare.
I’m not sure it will. Games are subjective and something like Starfield might be one of the biggest games and best games ever made, it is still a hard scifi western RPG. Skyrim has crossover appeal, selling millions, but it also has the benefit of being at the Right Time.
I don’t think moving the needle with a banger is the same and I bet you Xbox has the data to back that up. What is a success is what Phil was trying to impart - they want you to have a ready-made-backlog in Game Pass that is irresistible and Starfield isn’t about selling 2 million more Xboxes it is for the next gen when it is still there, along with Doom, CoD, TES6, Perfect Dark, Avowed, FH5… that are all still there and included in game pass. His point about losing the digital generation is true, so his pitch is to build a massive catalogue ymthat you’ll always have access to, free of any device.
That’s the future he’s build for, and right now we can’t see it. 2022 was lean, but in 2026 you have 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 games all still there, all still now in your Gamepass collection, and it has the live service games you always play like EAFC, Fortnite, CoD… That’s when the needle will move. 85% of players buy one or two games a year.
Like it or not we are the Whales of games. We spend big when others buy one game a year. Hence, GP is billions a year of cash.
I think you are looking at this from the wrong perspective. If all that Microsoft could do is compete as a games console against Sony and Nintendo then they’d have sold Xbox off or shut it down by now.
They have no interest in that. It’s a relatively small market. They know Sony have a strong brand and irrespective of what MS can or can’t do they are at the very best going to be a close second. And that’s the very best scenario. Which gives them very little scope to make it a meaningful thing for Microsoft. MS make an annual profit of about 80-90Bn. Sonys is about 10Bn and that’s not all PS. You have to see that gamepass and cloud extends the potential for Xbox to be something that satiates MS and its wider ambitions.
You either take Xbox for what it is or accept it wouldn’t exist.
It’s not what people want to hear apparently but it makes perfect sense with some context.
Nintendo really struggled with the N64 and GameCube despite have fantastic first party support and games to the point that people were talking about them leaving the home console market.
It was only when Nintendo changed strategy with the Wii and stopped directly competing with Sony that their fortunes changed.
Phil isn’t arguing that exclusives don’t matter or that Xbox shouldn’t make them but Xbox needs to do its own thing rather than copy the competition.
Would Xbox sell more consoles and subs if it had more exclusives? Yes of course. Would it allow them to make massive gains in market share? Probably not.
And Phil didn’t say anything else in that interview. He also never even remotely said great games wouldn’t help xbox as this thumb nail makes it out to be.
This post opens a can of worms insofar as you’re suggesting Xbox would have been shuttered without Game Pass. If it’s true, it’s borderline outrageous insofar as Microsoft has the means to exist & create in the hardware business without throwing itself behind a multiplatform rental service because it wasn’t happy with ‘losing’ the console war.
I little history lesson will show us Xbox started to suffer when Yusuf Mehdi went & dropped the TV, TV, TV bombshell on Xbox fans in 2013, just because Microsoft’s algorithms showed their Xbox 360 owners watched movies on the console. This was a tactic totally undone by smart TV’s (like who needs the console for Netflix when we have apps on the TV itself?).
Thinking ‘outside the box’ & looking for new angles to win at hasn’t always worked for MS (Kinect & the aforementioned TV centric Xbox One), so people should be careful with GP as well. It’s not the core of the Xbox business I invested into, for certain. There’s a side of Xbox which gets totally forgotten & that’s the hardware side, i.e. where for most of Xbox’s life on the market since 2001 it has been the best place to play multiplatform games.
And what PS5’s sales tell us is there is an absolutely enormous number of people in the console market who want a game console. Not play anywhere & not rental services. But actual game consoles. I think the people who looked at algorithms & emerging streaming tech & thought “hey, the future is gaming on all devices without dedicated hardware!” were wrong. Just like the people who thought motion controls were the future were wrong. And the people who thought TV apps on the console were the future… were wrong. Add the people who believed virtual reality was the future as well into that bucket. That’s a lot of mistakes over the past 15 years in this industry, on all sides & by all companies involved.
And among all of these attempts to shake up the market or create new markets, console hardware continues to sell like crazy. With games also selling like crazy. There’s a lesson to be learned there, i.e. “build it & they will come”, aka build the hardware, make the games & people will buy an Xbox.
I honestly don’t understand what you are alluding to in all your posts in this thread. And I don’t mean to be rude, just to be clear. The console exists and keeps existing. The games exist and will only get more plentiful. Game pass exists and takes nothing away from that, but adds to the experience. I guess, I don’t understand what your problem/ frustration with xbox in general is?
Sometimes I wonder if people are THAT dumb or are playing dumb (talking about the video)…hopefully it’s probably the latter.
What Phil said is right because even if MS from now on releases 10 “bangers”/90% MC scored games it would matter little when a casual gamer goes to a store to buy a console, Sony has the stronger brand name and the media consistently hype them up while at the same time add a negative twist on everything that Xbox does. I participate in “core” forums from the early 2000’s and I have never seen such a hyperbolic reaction such as the recent Redfall drama (not even something close to that).
The sad truth is that a huge part of the media/youtube wait in line to be a part of anything negative for Xbox but at the same time you wonder where the fuck were the positive articles/videos when Xbox in 2021 had an amazing line-up and had the highest publisher MC average score (yeah believe it or not even higher than the Prestige 1st party)…still waiting for those…even in the Game Awards FH5 and Halo Infinite “couldn’t make it” for “reasons” while Psychonauts 2 (which is a masterpiece) didn’t win a single nomination.
Just imagine if games like Ori 2 or Psychonauts were Sony exclusives, I guarantee you that a lot of folks would sing a totally different tune about those games. lol
My ‘problem’ if I was to have one (I mean really, this is just gaming, it’s not serious enough to warrant handwringing or anything) is the fact Microsoft have a really, really strong product with the Series X & also a very strong cheaper alternative with quite honestly really good results so far in most multiplatform games, aka the Series S.
But all the talk is “Game Pass, Game Pass, Game Pass” & now Phil Spencer saying “we’re not going to out console Sony & Nintendo”.
Yet they already did when they built better hardware… which they’ve almost forgotten to market because Game Pass is the focus. And that focus on Game Pass ironically puts more pressure on Xbox first party studios to deliver constant high rated games. In the history of games console they’ve always required 3 things above all other things: affordability, good hardware & huge third party support. Xbox has that, so advertise it.
I’ve literally just played the best game on the Series X IMO & that was Resident Evil 4 Remake. It looks better than on rival consoles as well. But Xbox has gotten itself into a little public relations quagmire by placing all the emphasis on Game Pass - not its hardware & not the broader availability on the system of the current best games which are by & large multiplatform games.
All this doom & gloom about Xbox means nothing to me as an Xbox Series X player because I’m not affected by Redfall being a bad game. Why? Because I don’t have Game Pass (anymore) & I have the best games out there available on the Series X. That’s the point I’m making here (& have made previously). That’s the strength of a console over a service. My Series X console can play thousands of games, most of which are now at an affordable price. Game Pass meanwhile has a few hundred games, most of which are indies & older titles which are losing value with each passing month (for example one of the best games on GP is Prey, aka a game which was $5 on the Xbox store a month or so ago).
*unless it is Sony-related. this is the same guy boasted “EA Activision greedy waah!” numerous times in the past but was silent and like “i know this is a bad news guys but listen…” when a negative sony news dropped.
He and so many others. They do the same talking points over and over again. I’m so over all of that stuff i don’t watch it anymore, and my gaming hobby has been so much better for it.
The comment that I dont particularly understand is the xbox one being the worst generation to lose because of building digital libraries.
We saw with iTunes that just because people build up digital libraries does not mean they stick in that ecosystem. When they can suddenly gain access to a massive library many times what their current one is, that existing digital library becomes less important. As someone that is so involved in pushing a subscription service, I dont understand the lack of perspective on that.
Video game ecosystems lock you in with things like the trophy system for example. If I have been playing on PlayStation for 2 or 3 generations and have thousands of trophies I’m going to probably prefer continuing to invest in the PlayStation platform than jumping ships.
Trophies are probably still just a niche aspect of gaming. I doubt platinum hunting for example ranks highly on PS5 owner’s ‘reasons I own the system’. It seems that way to me because the completion rate for trophies on sites like psnprofiles is quite low compared to how many people buy & play any particular game.
And Game Pass definitely won’t help Xbox tie anyone into the Xbox ‘ecosystem’ going forward because it’s a rental service, i.e. if a digital library is deemed important for customer loyalty going forwards, then Game Pass does nothing to improve Xbox’s situation in that regard.
Phil literally specified PS owners on his talk and you guys act like only PS and xbox gamers who exist in the gaming world. you can grow your userbase without baiting those who already invested in other brand.