Xbox Game Pass subscriptions miss Microsoft’s Executive Compensation target

[Zappy5]

@ThereAreFourNaan

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.

Yeah this is all true. The biggest problem is that many of the games you might really want to play on phone are of course touch control enabled but not in the way a typical phone user expects. It’s not the natural native experience. Which is why I think the big market is TVs and monitors and tablets where you play with a controller. Yes there is latency but for the average person who isn’t a big gamer they probably won’t even notice this too much.

I think the phone mobile market is more limited for xcloud than larger screens with an actual controller.

Xbox should think about making a very cheap controller for such use cases.

[CallMeCraig]

@ThereAreFourNaan

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.

Thats a bit of a chicken and egg problem. There are not a lot of big games on phones. What is there? Fortnite, Minecraft, Pubg, Genshin Impacht and …* ? All these are pretty huge. Why can’t Forza Horizon or Sea of Thieves achieve the same success on phones if infrastructure for streaming is there?

• i mostly only play Wordament on my phone so what do I know?

[ThePastyBandit (Dean)]

@Stefrah

…ugh 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.

I wonder if Sky partnering with Microsoft to build a tv with Sky built in is the beginning of this