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Agreed. It’s not console warring to state the verifiable fact that Microsoft has put out more content than Sony’s first party studios this year, even before Halo and Forza are released. People may want to get used to that fact given how many studios/teams Xbox has already.
The greater issue is the trend of pretending Xbox isn’t doing great, especially compared to five years ago, to bandy about some anti-Xbox fanboy narrative. That doesn’t belong, just like the same treatment for any of the other publishers. At the end of the day, all three are doing great right now, and that’s good for gamers and good for the growth/health of the industry (which in turn benefits Game Pass).
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This line perfectly sums up where we are at, all three big platforms (and id argue four with steam and what they’re doing both on pc and now branching into handheld). This is great for gamers and is already leading to more awesome games, New IP, more investment, more popular IP from books, comics, TV and movies becoming games. It’s just such an awesome time to be a gamer.
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As a general point when will it sink in with people that PS is a stronger brand and has been even when all the games were on the Xbox side and that the fanboy narratives will persist regardless of what happens because every year more people will buy a PlayStation than an Xbox and a certain proportion of those people will feel the need to continually justify their console of choice by putting down the other console.
It doesn’t matter what happens this will continue. There will always be ‘narratives’ regardless but people need to think beyond the simplistic PS sells more because of ‘X narrative’. The fact is that if all PS had was two side scrolling indies these would be the games to play and the only ones worth bothering with according to those narrative pushers. Stop thinking that internet narratives mean a thing and just accept that such fanboy drivel will always be there regardless. There is no sense in trying to satiate it because it’s impossible and never can be.
Speaking of how well they doing wrt reviews…AoE has 32 reviews and sits at 86 so far.
Literally the 3 best rated 2021 games are from Xbox Game Studios(Flight Simulator, Deathloop and Psychonauts 2)
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If 6 games all topping 85% in reviews in 6 consecutive months while reaching many millions of fans and dominating GotY noms/nods doesn’t count as turning out good games are a high rate then I dunno what does. Sony has never done that afaik.
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As a hardware-centric service, I think your estimations of a plateau at 50m sounds right.
The true future of the programme and its ultimate growth limits will hinge on the cloud service, though.
Right now, cloud is in beta. It’s not the equal of Stadia on the provider end and on the customer end most don’t have the internet infrastructure for it to be fully viable for all but a few genres.
Now fast forward to a point where standalone 5G (not the hybrid 4G/5G that is labelled ‘5G’) is ubiquitous. Now the real game begins.
TV apps and Dongles will bring xCloud to customers without their needing to buy a console at all. A standalone ‘Cloud’ subscription at a reduced price from the hardware service (say $5) and suddenly you have something really viable for the casual gaming market.
That’s where I think 50m gets surpassed and 100m could eventually be breached.
When you get to the point that people can buy a TV model for £50 more than the standard and it comes packaged with an Xbox controller, the wireless receiver built into the TV, and a 6 month Game Pass Cloud membership, that’s when it could really blow up.
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I gave Xcloud ago a couple months ago when staying with my parents and I had a pretty good experience with it even with a mediocre wi-if and using my iPhone.
I do think the market isn’t ready for cloud gaming going mainstream but I think it’s inevitable with 5G becoming more widespread that more people will have a good experience with it.
I don’t think the market is ever going to be ready for clipping phones to controllers. It’s awkward and unweildly. The phone controller snap on things? When the service is strong enough, maybe, but then I’m a gamer. I don’t expect casuals to invest in something expensive like that.
The potential of xCloud is in TVs.
Imagine this scenario. You like games but perhaps not enough to buy a console, or at least not until its had lots of price drops near the end of a generation.
You buy a TV and it comes packaged with an Xbox controller. You turn the controller on and it launches the xCloud app and offers you a month trial for free. Why not?
You are presetned with the entire Game Pass catalogue. No downloading of games, just pick any game and you’re straight in - fast due to the XSX blades and their SSD. You’re now fully in the Xbox ecosystem, and you can do anything. And you haven’t had to invest in anything or even think about it.
That’s the hook. The service needs improvement and the internet infrastructure needs improvement, but when they can get to that stage that someone just needs a TV and a cheaper cloud only game pass subscription, I think it could blow up.
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What’s XBL at wrt users? Isn’t it WAY higher than 50mil even today?
Probably not paid users. Xbox Live has been baked into a variety of things that boost the numbers.
I think PS Plus only has like 40 million on a base of over 100 million consoles. A similar attach rate on Xbox would put it closer to 20 million.
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Yeah I agree with clipping controller to the phone isn’t going to have much mainstream appeal. Things like Razerkishi are nice though because they basically turn your phone into a Switch.
You could also have a larger tablet or some sort of laptop which would be even better but I completely agree that streaming stick for tv’s or built into tvs would be the best prospect.
Once I get good enough performance in my area, I will get one of those Kishi things for sure. Wouldn’t be worth it right now, the latency isn’t good enough for me to seriously use the service as more than a novelty.
But I don’t think that method of accessing xCloud is ever going to get massive popular success. While partnering with TV manufacturers to just bake it into their TVs once the performance is there – that’s Trojan horsing the Xbox ecosystem into people’s houses under their noses. 
Xbox live gold is a mystery. Xbox Live was last recorded at 100m monthly users.
Realistically Gamepass could easily do 30 million subscribers on each Platform (PC, Console. Cloud) for a total of 90 million.
However the clouds growth potential is much, much higher then dedicated hardware.
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Wish we had a better idea of Game Pass PC numbers. Feels like we have absolutely no idea how well that’s doing.
I’m very much pro local hardware but I was shocked how playable games are on Xcloud from my experience. I even played games like Hades which require a lot of fast input and mostly had no issues with it.
Gamepass wise if Microsoft wants to go beyond say 50mill subs then the cloud is going to be a big part of that story in the long term.
Of course xCloud is gonna be huge on mobile devices, guys. That how everyone younger than us primarily plays games.
The youngins aren’t primarily playing console type experiences on their phones. Xcloud has issues on top of their native phone gaming anyway, extra latency, very high data usage, font sizes and layouts not optimised for small screens. Relative sparsity of touch controls and games that were balanced with full controllers in mind. That sort of thing.
There is some market there, but it’s not at all obvious how large it is. It might be huge, but it also might be fairly small. People who already game on console having their stuff on the go is a cool use case, but we simply don’t know what percentage of the reverse market might be interested in dipping their toes for a monthly fee.
Not just the younger also everyone else. Most people don’t care about console wars, they just want a fun game to pass the time.
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