What I’m saying is that in such a large pool of customers, hurting your own console by releasing your games on the direct competitors system when that is such a small portion of said pool seems unnecessary.
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Very weird how people moving the goalpost from console to games.
Jez, I and I think many people agree with you, but there are just times when it seems like you get way down in the dumps and get more negative about how you frame things than is necessary. I feel like a lot of the stuff you get flamed for would be better received if you just sat on it for like an hour and re read it. This post here sums up what you said earlier, but in a much more robust and nuanced way than what you tweeted. Part of that is just the way you have to put stuff for twitter, so maybe thats the issue lol.
Yeah, I am not a video game analyst, but I am still wondering how all of this will work. If you release games on the competitor than why would anybody want to invest on an xbox? I don’t think you can say gamepass is the answer because as we’ve seen the growth of the service has stagnated. I feel once you release the big games on Playstation than the value proposition of an xbox console sinks. The logical consumer would just buy a Playstation console and pay the $70 or wait for a sale on Microsoft games when they’re on Playstation
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Maybe the enthusiasts think like this, but the data shows that average people buying consoles today are not thinking of ‘exclusives’. The generation growing up now are thinking about convenience more when it comes to accessing the biggest games today (which are quantifiably not console ‘exclusives’).
Maybe they’re looking at the data and are seeing trends that they don’t think they can overcome.
They need to offset some of these costs on these games. I know people get really sensitive about this but gamepass really does impact the legs of first party games and if you aren’t constantly growing at a fast enough rate (which we know gamepass isn’t) then you aren’t really maximizing the profits of those said games.
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Game Pass is interesting. Not sure how they expected that to grow without trying to sell it tbh. Organically via word-of-twitter? I don’t know.
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People will think I am being too optimistic or something, but I really think we have not seen the final form of Game Pass yet. We have seen the GPU perks starting to become more meaningful. Also, I think there will a real impact when we see CoD actually launching Day 1 on GP. It’s hard for us to see now because we have not seen it yet in action.
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Call of Duty should have a huge impact! I’m also optimistic about Game Pass, it has so much potential and should be a huge pull-factor.
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I think that’s a fair take to have.
I’m a bit more cynical. I do think COD will help a lot with gamepass sign ups but it won’t be enough.
I’ll always be adamant that the best way to grow gamepass is to sell more Xbox hardware. That’s the weird dichotomy that Xbox finds themself in.
Selling more consoles is the biggest drive for gamepass growth but these new moves that Xbox are doing also help slow growth in that area.
It’s quite fascinating.
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I think they 100% thought Gamepass would take off on PC like it did on consoles. Clearly that isn’t the case which really limits the ceiling of Gamepass if the console market isn’t growing.
It’s still growing on PC of course but at a much slower rate than any of us thought.
The strategies does seem to conflict a bit…
I feel it’s unfair to say the market doesn’t care about exclusives because xbox sales did increase when starfield, halo, and Forza Horizon launched. Also, those games still had strong launches and whatnot. I think we can’t determine what the market is saying based on Microsoft when they’re a distant third in sales.
At the moment the gamepass service isn’t a selling point and many aren’t aware of the service. So, Microsoft needs to bring back focus on games to entice people because they haven’t been doing that imo. I enjoy their output, but their games doesn’t have mass appeal imo
I feel gamepass is tricky because we don’t have access to it’s data. However, with growth stagnated it most likely means they need to find that lost growth revenue somewhere, so releasing elsewhere helps. However, it will most likely result in alienating their core audience . At this point, I feel gamepass is not at a healthy subscriber level to offset cost, which is why they’re doing this pivot
The plan you mention is one I wanted Xbox to go for after the ABK acquisition, and the one I was annoyed at vanishing when the rumours about multi-platform started swirling.
But then having thought it over, CoD is one game a year at best - even if MS did actually spend proper money on marketing Game Pass rather than just CoD, so people had heard of it, many gamers might figure out buying CoD alone is cheaper than paying for Game Pass every month (given many of those players buy just CoD and maybe a sports game each year) - and definitely cheaper than getting an Xbox to do so, as well.
And they wouldn’t be able to push CoD too far ahead of PlayStation on their next-gen console until the PS6 was out I’d imagine, due to the whole parity issue that many regulators were worried about (that PS could get an inferior CoD to sabotage them).
While Xbox could get acquisitions signed off as they’re balance-sheet neutral, Microsoft actually throwing money at Xbox (so losing money / making less profit from it) is unlikely to happen beyond investment in things like Game Pass (as shareholders love subscriber numbers) and general game development - they’re never going to push the marketing budget as high as PlayStation (ABK’s budget might help there, as they hopefully leave that alone due to CoD) and probably not sign off quite as much R&D as Sony seems to do,
For Sony, PlayStation is a massive part of their revenue, so they have to innovate a little each generation to encourage their players to upgrade (DualSense this time), and they’ve built a marketing machine that does blanket coverage like Nintendo does - but MS comes from the corporate arena where it just doesn’t understand that marketing (and to be honest, Nintendo and Sony will probably start to cut the marketing budget back a little as development costs balloon - I see 50 ads per game whenever they have something to release).
The Series consoles are tracking behind the One as far as I’ve heard, and to me that’s staggering as I thought we were set up for the best generation since the 360 - but in reality, most gamers aren’t like you and switch, they stick with what they know and where their friends and purchases are - and Sony has built some serious brand recognition / loyalty by achieving the goal of PlayStation being synonymous with “games console” just like Hoover is with vacuum cleaners, in the UK at least.
(The amount of times I’m asked “oh so you’ve got a PlayStation? Or Nintendo?” by someone who doesn’t know gaming that well and I have to explain what an Xbox actually is!)
I guess my point is that I realised while I really wanted Microsoft to take the gloves off, fight like hell and gain back market share, that they probably had the data, marketing research and focus groups to show even if they blew billions they’d not gain an inch - and given Xbox has to earn its living in Microsoft it seems, that could actually lead to the end of it.
Instead, going multi-platform where they can may bring in the extra money to develop more games for Game Pass (which however stable an income it produces, is probably not helping first party sales however much I hate to admit it), and I suspect the PC stores on Xbox is an attempt to get ahead of the “walled gardens” issue the EU has and hurt Sony by them seeming to be anti-competitive by staying closed when Xbox opens up.
They’re not going to stop making consoles (as Surface hardware shows, as they keep making that despite it not setting sales records), and the PC stores gets around the third-party games not coming to Xbox issue (which is likely to get worse otherwise as Xbox continues to lag in third place) - and I suspect if the EU etc. force Sony to open up too that’s just a cherry on top for Microsoft…
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It’s shocking that I’ve never seen a gamepass commercial or ad on tv. I watch a lot of sports, and I think I’ve only seen a gamepass ad once. Meanwhile, I see ads all the time for Playstation major releases. I feel word of mouth can only get you so far, and they need to market gamepass better because many aren’t aware of service imo
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I see gamepass ads all the time on youtube, twitter and instagram. Yall for whatever reason aren’t getting their targeted ads
I think they have done a pretty good job at marketing it for console users. There’s like 30-35M subscribers and like what ? 55 million active console users ? I feel like they squeezed most of the console user base, there’s not much growth to be had there.
It’s the PC demographic that they need to target and those guys don’t follow traditional marketing.
Even with all the ads and with Xbox declining, PS5 is still tracking worse than the PS4. People just aren’t seeing the value in these consoles like they used to.
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Yeah, I honestly don’t understand why there isn’t a mainstream campaign to highlight Game Pass and the Series consoles. The Series S and Game Pass/FTP games is such a good selling point for the mainstream community.
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The Xbox console base is saturated. They’re on GP. So you’re really just trying to get PC players, who are next to impossible to move off of steam and PS gamers, who do not want to move off of PS. Gamepass isn’t selling consoles. MS’s moves are to make it undeniable on PC and positioned well for Cloud
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