Sony's possible response to Microsoft buying Zenimax

Nah, just seems exactly like what Playdead’s inside was back in 2016. It was timed exclusive to Xbox for a similar amount of time and then went to playstation. Seems to me like a case of small indie getting paid to work on one platform at a time. Cuz there’s like literally not much use to a three month exclusive lol.

You’d be fucking amazed what Sony pay for for timed exclusivity or exclusivity. Remember cod beta demo?

Sometimes companies aren’t going to give Sony a full year.

Also if you’re gonna focus on a platform…switch would be the one. Disco is perfect suited to switch.

And the game is like over a year old. Just wait and put out the game on all 3 consoles at the same time.

And the Destiny and Destiny 2 strike missions and weapons they kept exclusive to Playstation for years

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Don’t think there’s any way Sony can respond soonish.

Ms can invest now in game development at this insane rate because they already have everything in place with their subscription.

Sony is using an outdated model that doesn’t support a flow of big productions (eg: GoW costed 100+mi to produce, at least the same amount as that for marketing, and generated around 450mi in revenue as of last year, that’s not a huge turn around), whereas gamepass is already making almost 6 times that yearly even without any big release.

So before Sony even tries to match the output Ms is aiming for they first have to increase their platform range (started doing it by porting to PC, but their support is still a joke compared to Ms that has been putting everything day one for years), then they have to start putting newish games on their catalog and see if their offerings are indeed good enough to drive the necessarry growth the subscription needs.

Only after all that (and it took 2-3 years for Ms to get there) they can start spending money knowing there will be a return otherwise they could just be throwing it down the toilet)

Mind you, it’s clear Sony is aiming at that, but since they were late, don’t expect they to be able to match at least 2 years from now.

People say that gamepass isn’t sustainable, but paying for timed or full exclusivity will only get more expensive.

Sony won’t be able to keep this up, and I hope SF6 is only timed and not full…

This is true, but the cost of securing third party content for Game Pass will go up as users increase as well.

Both strategies make sense for their respective positions in the market.

Thing is, gamepass generates money faster than single exclusives for PlayStation, so they’re going to hit a wall faster.

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Is it though? I think it is vice versa - bigger Game Pass, more people will want to put their games there. Similar to the market share - bigger market share, cheaper deal. Imaging Game Pass having 50 mil. - one money hat is Playstation + PC, while other money hat is PC + Game Pass + Xbox + XCloud and optional PS5. What would any company choose?

MS would have to pay more for making the game available to 100M users as opposed to 20M users is my thought.

What? It doesn’t make sense.

When Sony pays for timed exclusive, they are paying to make up the cost of lost sales (of Xbox users).

When Microsoft pays for Game Pass, they are paying for the cost of lost sales (of Game Pass users)

No, the publisher doesn’t lose much by putting the game on Game Pass, because they get recurring revenue. I would argue that Playstation lose more because if a multiplatform game is put on Game Pass, there are high chances that people will play in on Game Pass rather than buying disc on Playstation - keep in mind that platform holders get a lot of money from 30%.

At this point one would argue that Sony’s moneyhats are detrimental to the gaming in general, because gamers do not benefit from them.

I think there are multiple revenue models for Game Pass, i am not sure whats most common. I do know that there is a lump sum model, which is what I am assuming here. Agreed that in a revenue share model the publishers would make more money.

Yeah, there are multiple models but Game Pass is very attractive for third parties unless you are a huge huge game.

This likely won’t happen, but it’s worth pointing out the sheer scale of actions. :rocket: :full_moon:

  • Sony partners up with RTS for a stake in EVO.
  • Microsoft acquires all of Discord.
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I mean, as users increase, Xbox’s revenue from it increases as well, therefore they will be able to have even more money for 3rd party Game Pass deals.

Agreed. You have to look at it as cost per unit or cost per customer. I think Disney+ says their revenue / user is about $4 per month. So they have 100 million accounts, and are spending about $3 / account per month on content. That’s still $300 million per month, but adding more accounts doesn’t mean they lose money even if they pay a greater dollar amount for content.

Xbox game pass users increasing means that the total dollar amount Microsoft pays goes up, but it should mean each user costs them slightly less or allows them to earn another fraction of a penny of revenue per account.

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Rdr2 was huge. Came to gamepass 8 months after release. So did monster hunter world and dmc5. This was before gsmepass was even thst big back in 2018 and 2019.

Yeah obviously you aren’t gonna get day 1 gta6. Buy that’s an extreme

If MS can convince SE to put ff16 on gamepass a year after ps5 exclusive runs out. That’s huge.

All of a sudden there year exclusivity doesn’t have as much appeal

Day 1 70 bucks for ps5 Day 365 free on gamepass on xbox series xs

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I don’t think they will respond with something just as big as Bethesda, they will likely acquire some studios in the Insomniac Games range and they will keep paying some publishers like SE to keep certain games away from Xbox for as long as possible or maybe even forever depending on what happens with Forspoken and FFR7, if FFR7 doesn’t come out on Xbox then I wouldn’t expect FF16 or Forspoken either.

I disagree. The more market share that Microsoft has, the more leverage they have over publishers. Right now Publishers have more leverage over Microsoft, but if Game Pass reaches mass adoption then the balance is shifted in MS favour and MS will have more leverage, especially over companies that have their own subscription service.

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