I honestly don’t think we’d greenlight Tell Me Why if not for Game Pass. It’s an episodic, story-driven game – you don’t see a lot of them getting made. We knew with the 15 million subscribers we have now, that it would get played, and that people would engage in it more than they would if there was a $30 price point in front of it. Even Flight Simulator is a game we would not have green-lit if we did not see Game Pass growing. We had a million players of Battletoads! These are all examples of games that in an exclusively retail model would be more challenged.
At the end of the day that’s pretty much it. To be honest last gen was the first time around I didn’t own all consoles but even then I started looking at how many games I actually owned for the systems that were not my “main”, and it wasn’t much, making me realize that paying a fee hundred $ for only a few exclusives isn’t worth it. Game Pass gives me value and more games than I have time to play for less than I was spending before and I don’t feel like I am missing out on anything and I’ve been gaming for the last 30 years. I hear more and more people talking about Game Pass as well in the wild so it’s really getting some traction and most are happy with it. And the fact that it works with PC (that I own because I travel a lot for work) and cellphone is really consumer friendly and pushes their narrative that console sales aren’t the only thing you need to be looking at. They’re not just giving excuses (unlike what the trolls are saying on Twitter) and their revenues/profits on services show that Game Pass is working for them.
Another benefit of game pass is that all the games on there seem to have healthy multiplayer numbers even if they are old. Saw someone saying they were happy that BFV multiplayer was a alive again.
I can see this continuing going forward as subs grow.
As an aside, one has to assume they will hit 20 million subs some point early next year.
Halo Infinite launch day multiplayer servers better be robust, going to have something like 10+ million players on day one.
This new attitude from Xbox tends to really piss fanboys off cause they somehow needs a sale number metric to compare to so they can prance around the internet on forums proclaiming their console sells more.
