Yup, but it wasn’t a day one thing like some predicted/speculated. Grubb speculated that it would launch day and date on Game pass and it’s his biggest miss so far.
After what seemed to be a tease on Twitter before Arise came out it really looked it was happening. Shame it didn’t.
Oh I’m not afraid of that at all. Gaming is in a very good place for Xbox now, which is great for everyone.
tbf that was a mistake from Grubb that he immediately corrected just a day or two after IIRC.
But I remember Nick teasing how “those aren’t all the platforms Tales of Arise is launching on” on twitter, which some people (reasonably tbh lol) presumed to mean gamepass.
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I really think MS should pursue those kinda games that aren’t just the same co-op/live service games which just “make sense for gamepass”. I wanna see a big AAA third party game on Gamepass that makes absolutely no sense to launch but still does, and does to great success.
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I bet once XGS games are dropping on it more regularly it will increase way more, the only problem is that this won’t be 2022 yet, more like 2023.
It’s unfortunate because I remember we had Metro Exodus and Shadow of the TR pretty soon after their official release. Metro was like a few months later?
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yes, will take a while.
Yeah, Metro Exodus was a good instance. SotTR launched soon too, but that game bombed hard for Square Enix so it makes sense they scrambled and put it on everything. It was on PS Now as well IIRC. Scarlet Nexus also now arrived a few months later. But still, not launch.
I wanna see launch. It makes no sense for any third party AAA publisher to do so, but I wanna see one that is convinced (and likely paid in droves lol).
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Offer Namco Bandai a truckload of cash to have Elden Ring day one on there. Souls games do well on Xbox, don’t they? Have it announced at TGA for maximum exposure.
I can see Guardians of the Galaxy landing on GP relatively soon too. I don’t think it’s going to be a huge hit, sadly.
I mean, if they couldn’t get ToA or Scarlet Nexus on day 1 (the latter which even had marketing deal with Xbox), I highly doubt Elden Ring can happen. Although I’d agree with you, that would be absolutely massive, possibly the most aggressive move (yet not exclusionary like timed exclusive bs) Xbox will have done for Gamepass. They likely don’t have anything for first half of 2022 from first party outside game updates and halo stuff, so this would bring big numbers.
Yeaah, Square Enix is basically sending their western division to a deathmarch rn lol it’s unfortunate, but I hope the game either succeeds for the studio’s good, or fail so that SE realizes they should stop fucking over their western division and let them make their own IP instead of just licensing them Marvel properties that come with huge baggage of expectations external to them.
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oh I have no doubts . It has flop ( couldn’t find a milder word ) written all over it .
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Sony has the marketing rights, so it could have 1-year clause, similar to RE8
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I don’t like much Souls games, but I recognize their appeal, it’s time for bigger moves concerning 3rd party stuff, Football Manager 2022 day one is good, but it’s a pc focused game like Humankind (that’s also pc only), Outriders and MLB were also “niche” AAA games. They need a mainstream get and Elden Ring, while no Battlefield, Halo, TES, etc…, is certainly bigger than the previous gets.
Until the 1st party line-up become constant and not sparse (next year first half will be only a tad better than this year one), they need to do it, otherwise I find questionable a 50% growth forecast.
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Having said that, this is big W. There’s a reason why the first game’s never left the service, MS is in very good relations with Focus. I’m expecting TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge to make it day 1 as well cuz of DotEMU (which Focus now owns), barring any licensing hurdles.
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Gamepass has more than enough games and new ones will come in all the time. But content is not the major barrier to adoption its viable entry points. More consoles being produced and getting into consumers hands will aid this as will gamepass on tablet and phone and TV etc…but the cloud stuff is still probably a little too early for the mass market and doesn’t work brilliantly for me (using mesh wifi) and others I’ve seen and heard have the same issue.
cloud is at least 3 years away from taking off.
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Then we come back to the usual weak marketing issue, you can’t grow GP more if a huge bunch of people actually don’t know what it is. XD
This lower than expected growth could be a good news in hindsight, it could open MS eyes about many weak spots in their Xbox grand plan.
But until you have cloud where its mass market ready and consoles for people to buy - what will you market? The thing is growth of gamepass is tied to availability right now - and probably is saturated amongst existing xbox owners. So the only real growth area is PC UNTIL they can get more consoles into the market.
I agree. And its not being pushed as the big thing. Though we see markets where supposedly its doing really well. But obviously as it matures and gets better the situation changes. It also changes when its a native TV app across all TV’s sold - that means people can play without a console in the usual way. That starts to open new markets too. As does better implementation on phones…on 4G I find it more or less unusable.
They could market better the consoles outside anglosphere, believe me they can, lol. Then yeah, pc is the other area of growth.
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The service needs more big day one releases, people don’t subscribe to GP to play Indie games.
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Cmon guys, 48% is not the sales expectations Ms missed.
This would be an outstanding achievement in which they would have give a bonus to Nadella for achieving that, so they missing that target, specially by 10% does not mean they aren’t happy with the result.
As a matter of fact, they actually expected it to slow down this year per the last fiscal report due being compared to the pandemic boost of last year. And they still achieved a double digit growth.
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