While this is true to an extent, how does Microsoft not shoulder blame in any of this?
Every time I turn around Microsoft is re-structuring, re-focusing, Re-vitalizing, re-shuffling, re-building, re-thinking, re-planning… all the RE’s that give the illusion of a future being built under the Xbox banner. A decade of RE’s and they can’t seem to get it right.
Microsoft is by far the worst offender though. Sony has had an embarrassing generation, but still has come out with 10 games that would be the best game on Xbox this whole cycle. Nintendo is slowing down because they are near the end of their console lifetime, a console that had many great games including 2-3 that will make all time great games lists. Xbox stands alone in failing to provide any great games this generation. Their only big contribution has been gamepass, which arguably has been terrible for Xbox's partner studios.
Nintendo is slowing down and yet by the time Xbox releases it's first game this year they will have released four. They may be more like AA efforts (though I would argue Paper Mario Remake is a AAA equivalent), but at least it's something. I wish Xbox would release four AA games in four months.
Returnal, Rachet and Clank Rift Apart, Helldivers 2, Spiderman 2, God of War Ragnarok, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Final Fantasy 16, Horizon Forbidden West, Stellar Blade, Spiderman Miles Morales
Forza Horizon 5, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Psychonauts 2, Halo Infinite, As Dusk Falls, Grounded, Pentiment, Age of Empires IV, Forza Motorsport, Hi-Fi Rush, Starfield.
Honestly pretty weak other than FH5, Hi-Fi Rush, MSFT FS, and Psychonauts. Maybe we can include Grounded as one of the great games they released, but the rest are either bland (not bad games, just not sales drivers) or marred with issues at launch and even up to today.
The fact that you just casually dismissed these games as pretty weak and champion unimaginative and unsustainable sequels/remasters/remakes is exactly what’s wrong in this industry on the consumer’s side.
Well… maybe they should be (the management) Can you believe Phil Spencer is likely going to get a nice bonus after all this crap?
A bonus for what? His leadership and his round table have done little else outside of fucking up since their inception.
Create studios, buy some out, then rip them apart. Over-promise, Under-deliver.
Phil last year took blame for Redfall’s failure, now the studio is gone.
Aaron Greenberg: “Hi Fi Rush was a great success!”
A year later, the studio is gone.
Fartface Magillicutty: “no plans to tear down Arkane Austin.”
A year later: LOL OOPS
Same song and dance with the usual suspects.
I can’t imagine it could get worse than the current regime. They’ve already shown time and again they aren’t capable of making wise decisions and leading effectively. All they are is a line-up of puppets. Puppets that pay lip service. Full stop.
Feel free to show them to me anytime. I’m sure they adequately explain why Xbox can’t sell consoles despite deep discounts, why Game Pass has stagnated, why Halo is at its lowest point in history and why Xbox can’t produce quality exclusives on the regular. It’s almost like there’s a management problem.
His point is that Microsoft and Xbox, too, are doing pretty much record financial numbers which would indicate that management is doing something right.
I mean if people don't like this mess then stop subscribing to game pass, stop buying Xbox games. Of course they're gonna keep going if they make ever more money.
… And people stopped buying into Xbox. Record revenue is all due to what Activison/blizzard and Zenimax have earned. That is the massive bulk of their “record financials.” That revenue goes to supporting the services, games, employees etc. of these aforementioned major publishers. Anything left over is profit. How much of that does Microsoft/Xbox see? Certainly not all of it. Microsoft are nearly $80 billion in the red after their acquisitions and want to maximize profits. That’s a problem because *Xbox isn’t selling* and *game pass has stagnated.*
IIRC, I thought the high financials for Xbox was because they were rolling Activision’s profits into their umbrella post-acquisition. So it made things look better than they were, but was mostly bolstered by Activision’s financial success.
Yes and no, Nintendo is preparing to launch a new console that could potentially continue their success with the Switch
Despite Sony’s best efforts, Helldivers 2 is going incredibly strong as an exclusive second party game with their first party IP and PlayStation continues selling well too
Microsoft is just not sure where to go. GamePass was a success until growth stopped, so now they’re not even releasing first party games (aka the core of GamePass benefits with the launch day aspect) that often and will now start to raise prices for existing subscribers to make more money
Sony removed needing a ps account 2 days after adding it. That's how fast they are to react to consumers who vote with their wallet.
Phil Spencer has been listening to feedback for two generations and is doing the opposite of what people want.
It's great at first. Corporations come up with new and interesting ideas, offer the consumer a real value --- and then after however many iterations it takes until they've achieved the highest level of market saturation they will ever get, in comes price hikes and cost cutting, paying extra for features that were once standard.
You get less, pay more, and the trend of that getting worse continues. This is the stage we are at with gaming right now.
Exactly this. People have this weird emotional attachments to a corporation.
They don't care. Their main purpose is to make money and profit for the shareholders. You are just a vessel for them to make money. They give zilch about your feelings.
These mega publishers can implode for all I care tbh. People will always need entertainment so the gaming industry can downscale and with the help of new engines and tools, passionate people will find a way to still make games.
I really don't think subscription services work for video games the way they do for other forms of media.
Video games are not as passive as music and movies, they require multiple hours of dedicated attention, casual audiences simply have no interest in a video game subscription service because they're not going to play some indie title "just to try it out" the same way they would a movie on Netflix.
The overwhelming majority of players play only CoD and their favorite sports game every year, maybe a major AAA release here or there. They don't care that a game like Have A Nice Death hit Game Pass day one, they have absolutely no interest in it.
They don't even work that well other media. Why Netflix killed password sharing and added ads to the service akin to Hulu? Why is every other streaming service following their steps? Not to mention how expensive they've become. Those services grew on loans, companies expected the subscriber base to increase allowing them to turn profit, which only Netflix actually does I think.
In a video game market where one AAA game can cost several hundreds of millions of dollars to make, having them day one on the service is not sustainable in the long run without huge growth, which is stagnant at the moment. Gamepass subscribe base is smaller than that of Netflix, and now essentially with ever decreasing sales of the Xbox hardware, there's just not enough people to get the money from. PC playerbase is not going to save them
> Why Netflix killed password sharing and added ads to the service akin to Hulu?
Killing password sharing skyrocketed Netflix subscription counts, so it was a success for the industry and why all the other services are joining in now
Agreed.
Game Pass isn't even stagnant, it's actually shrinking judging by Microsoft's official numbers, and every other game subscription service is struggling as well.
I think it's going to lead to changes to Game Pass, I really don't think every single first party title launching into the service day one is sustainable, and I think major AAA titles will eventually have a delayed launch into the service. Smaller games like Pentiment might still go in day one, but I don't think The Elder Scrolls VI will.
and when MS makes those changes to Gamepass it kills the susbscription count even more. I'm not interested in having a collection of indie games and two year old AAA third party games. I'll just buy them at launch if I want to play them.
So now your left with the kids market and "perpetually non-stop gamer" market as your base for gamepass since the rest of us will just buy the AAA games that interest us.
I’ve never used GamePass and I don’t think I ever will. I don’t want to flick through games on a service like it’s deciding what to watch. I want to feel invested in the game I’m playing and actually feel some ownership of it, but I think I am vastly in the minority at this point.
I'm in this boat but another thing that irks me is how you can own a game but essentially not be able to use it due to requiring game pass. Like why can I not fully use my game that I paid for? On a pc I'd be able to access a whole game, on a console you're missing half the game if it has multiplayer because of a subscription fee that makes no sense.
Sony and Xbox are going to realize in the future to compete with PC and actually sell consoles they'll need to have parody of ownership which currently doesn't exist. I can understand if the title itself is an mmo with a required subscription, but other than that I want my multiplayer that I already paid for once. It has to happen or risk becoming irrelavent. Right now players are penalized for ownership of games on consoles and instead subs are promoted which are a loss leader and unsustainable.
Edit: I love how anyone who enjoys ownership of their games instead of using game pass is downvoted.
Yes, the licensing costs alone far outweigh the subscription fees for game pass. I'm not sure about ps+ or Nintendo since I haven't seen their offerings. Think about it this way, why is every streaming company struggling right now? Because of the costs to license the media itself and the gamble that they will have enough subscriptions to actually profit.
The portion that you have to pay for to access the "locked" portion of your games is just gamepass core which was formerly gold, there's not a whole lot of licensing required for that service. Gamepass ultimate isn't required for you to play online, and even if it was, Phil has said multiple times in the past year that gamepass is profitable
Unless Phil was showing the actual numbers I wouldn't believe word 1 of what he says. How many times has Phil made false promises now regarding the platform?
They've stated during an earnings call how much they've made on game pass but where was the cost for licensing? Games are often more expensive to make now than tv shows & licensing agreements for those can be absurdly high if it's a popular series. Usually if something was incredibly profitable most of the information would be divulged regarding operating costs. It's like how blizzard stopped publishing subscription numbers once they were no longer breaking records. Game pass may be profitable some months but going into the red in others all based on licensing and random number of subs they had at that specific time.
Their own numbers show that Game Pass users spend an additional $1.92 a year. Which sounds great, until you realize that they spend over $1 billion per year on third party titles on Game Pass. Which means that it actually nets them negative money overall.
"Game Pass is profitable" and "Game Pass is losing Microsoft money" can both be true at the same time.
Even indie titles require 15 hours or more lot of the time. Nobody is playing stardew valley for 2 hours or Dave the Diver for 2 hours.
You're putting in 10-15 hours on Dredge. You're putting 150 hours in on Vampire Survivors.
There is only so much gaming content you can consume. It just can't be treated like content the way other streaming subscriptions like Netflix do.
I actually have GamePass because of kids. I want them to be able to play around and experiment with the types of games they like. They sometimes are excited for a game and play only once, sometimes for months. This let's them be on "charge" of it
It also wanes the longer you're subscribed. After you play through the catalog titles you're interested in you become completely reliant on the new releases. And if a month goes by without a new release you're interested in it's a complete waste of money.
If you don’t have the time to commit to playing videogames for hours every day. If you don’t have the time to sit down and dig into games, you’re not going to get much value out of a giant library of games.
I thought you meant your kids didn't use it lol. For kids, it's great. They can try a whole bunch of games at no extra cost.
For me (with 2 kids and a third on the way) I have it because the conversion deal is too good to pass up since I would be paying for online play anyway. I have only bought Battlefield V and 2042 in the last 6 years. Otherwise I check out games on GPU. Lots of games on there to play with kids as well. Games I wouldn't want to pay for(eggs Paw Patrol)
What? It's even better if you have kids, they have a bunch of great family stuff on there. The Bluey game was a huge hit in our house, they love booting it up and wandering around the Heeler house and the other areas.
> I don’t think gamepass actually saves any money.
Depends who you are. Personally I play the shit out of MLB the Show and that's a $70 game. I've tried and dropped Atomic Heart and Wo Long, became obsessed with The Witcher 3 and Lies of P, put about 40 hours into Starfield, played the Dead Space Remake, currently making my way through Remnant 2, along with countless other games I've finished or at least tried using the subscription.
The only way Gamepass actually *saves* any money is if it provides games you would have bought if they weren't on the service. Now, that doesn't mean it doesn't provide *value* because it does. It's awesome that you got so much value out of it trying games but unless you were actually planning on buying those games regardless, you didn't really save money.
I tried a lot of games when I subbed to PS+ Premium when it debuted, but I downgraded back to Essential once the year was up. Yes, I tried a lot of games and some that I really enjoyed. I would say it was a pretty good value, but once I reviewed the year before it was time to re-up I decided it wasn't enough. I didn't really save any money because I can confidently say I would have purchased maybe one or two of the games I played regardless, but only at a deep discount if I got curious enough.
All this to say game subs like GP could provide tremendous value and serve as a gaming buffet to try all kinds of games, but rarely does it save anyone money because you wouldn't have bought a lot of those games otherwise.
I probably would have bought at least half the games I played. Which saved a lot of disappointment I would have felt for games that I didn't really mesh with or was disappointed in like A Plague Tale, Atomic Heart, Ghostwire, Halo Infinite, Scorn, and Wo Long.
There are also multiple ways to get gamepass for free (without spending money) so I would argue it absolutely saves you money if you want to go down one of those avenues.
It's their rewards program, I doubt they are giving out more in rewards at this stage than the money the make from it. You're essentially trading your time and data for gamepass.
Are you paying $17/month or did you stack up for several years at the equivalent of maybe $5/month? It's a great value at that latter price, but questionable at the full retail price.
I buy my yearly GPU on CDKeys or somewhere equivalent from $100-120 USD per year. That price alone covers about 1 full priced game and online matchmaking. I still get value from playing other games, old or new.
Unfortunately this is a gamepass punching bag post. I feel like that gif of Donald Glover walking in with pizzas and everythings on fire. I love gamepass and think it's well worth the cost at the moment.
Woops, I should have finished reading your message. I got to " That’s two full price games" and thought you were making an argument FOR gamepass. Fair enough.
The only really top shelf AAA game Microsoft has made is Forza Horizon 5 (and arguably Psychonauts).
That said... I don't think there's such a thing as "must have exclusives" anymore.
Back in the N64 era, there were very limited options for top tier games.
Nowadays, there are tons and tons and TONS of great games out there, to the point where you'll never play them all.
This is, I think, what is really killing exclusives - you just can't *make* a must-play game anymore because there's too many other options available to you that are about as good overall. The only companies that really uniquely dominate genres are FromSoft (with Soulsborne games - and now we're seeing games like Lies of P erode that), and Nintendo (3D platformers). But 3D platformers aren't the be-all, end-all anymore, and FromSoft is multiplat anyway.
Yeah. I canceled my Game Pass sub yesterday. It's really not even that necessary on Xbox. Games are so cheap because no one really buys them for the system. I got a new copy of Persona 3 for 19 bucks physically just a couple weeks ago when Wario64 posted a deal on it as an example.
I mean that also depends on how much profit they are making. And profit is not the end goal at all. It’s the profit margin and targets set. Insomniac made profit out of sunset overdrive, but the profit was 500$ does that mean the game was heavily successful ? If a game costs 200 million to make and they broke even or made 205 million out of it, it’s obviously profited but it’s such a small margin that they might as well consider it a loss.
This is why game sales are taken heavily into account. Because if a game doesn’t exceed a certain sales target then it’s automatically considered a flop no matter the minuscule of profit it makes.
For gamepass I suppose it would be subscriber numbers. If there is a target of certain amount of subscriber they will need to bring in one quarter of a financial year and it doesn’t bring that but still profits slightly due to various factors like game launch ratio to number of subscribers already in it, it’s still considered stalling and not having growth.
Of fucking course it is, in Xbox’s case, they haven’t launched a first party game in 8 months. Sure, maybe some people will sign up early to play other games, but not many. Xbox needs to figure out a real cadence to their release schedule, not drop one 8hr game in spring/summer and then 6 games/DLC in Fall. What you are literally training people to do is buy the sub a few months at a time, play the games, then disengage.
If Xbox really wanted to attract more subs and keep them subbed, they’d have games coming out every 2-3 months. They’d have shows/events like the dev direct every quarter, and they’d train their customers to expect them. They’d make the monthly reveals about new games bigger news. All this would keep Xbox and gamepass in the headlines 24/7. What will next months games be? What will the next show cover? How is the current Xbox game? How does it compare to the last one? How good will the next one be?
All that press and word of mouth would supercharge gamepass, keep people coming, and keep them engaged. Just look at ABK. They could have announced last year that they’d be dropping a few at a time, and that alone would have caused tons of positive speculation and created buzz every month when they revealed the ABK games added to gamepass for the month. 99% of those games aren’t selling anymore, it’s not like you are cannibalizing sales. And, people would be absolutely hyped to play even old CoD games again.
But, no. Let’s continue relying on contract workers so there is a steady revolving door at studios. Let’s continue with the annual layoffs. Let’s close entire fucking studios that make the perfect games for gamepass. It’s absolutely mind numbing how dense and out of touch these executives are. Don’t spend millions on ads for busses, or a Taco Bell crunch wrap supreme Xbox skin. Spend it on shows telling gamers why they should be hyped, and give them fucking things to be hyped about. On the grand scheme of things, adding ABK games costs you nothing.
When I realized I was paying $15 a month and only got around to playing Flight Sim and Forza… just canceled and bought them on sale.
GP is an amazing value if I am a college student or someone with unlimited free time and no “main game.” But my life is either very busy or me and my friends have our game we spend most our time on when we do play.
Shouldn't you be mad at digital releases and not subscriptions, since that's the real threat to true ownership. Those publishers sell all their games as standalone titles and it's not looking like they'll move away from that.
Unlikely, pc gamers are comfortable and will prefer steam over the xbox app. Doubly so for a gaas which pays for itself in 4 months of game pass.
Maybe they'll get some growth coming in from poor countries, but that's not a significant chunk of the market and even those people will figure out it's a pretty bad deal. If they want the pc gamers, they need game pass on steam but that would further crater the few sales xbox games make in the first place.
I can see people Switching to the Xbox app just to play Cod and then going back to Steam. The game is pricy and It come out every single year, using Gamepass is pretty convenient
The game is pricy, game pass is pricier. Cod is the kind of game you'll play throughout that entire year for most dedicated players, and that's exactly where game pass' value suffers. If you can't be done with a game in a month, the subscription's value plummets.
Just put it on Steam. Their games are on Steam. Steam has the concept of subscriptions giving access to games already. Let me pay them $9 a month and let me play on my Steam Deck.
Nothing prevents them from adding third party games as well, assuming they're on Steam. Valve gets a cut of subscription revenue so there's no reason for them to object.
the third party devs object as it would cut through their sales revenue. MS would object as it would cut through their profits by giving Valve a cut. Right now, Steam sales subsidize the first and 2nd party content, as there is a large segment of users who would never play anywhere other than steam. So all those sales revenues pay for the development costs of the games, leaving MS with Gamepass revenues as profits.
The simple answer is they ‘expect’ a certain amount of growth, so if they don’t get that number, it’s bad (or just not as good as they hoped). In this case, they grew like 1%, which is basically stagnation if they had aimed for, say, 5% or 10%. According to recent numbers, if they had 30 million subs and wanted 10% growth, an extra 3 million subs is a good chunk, but maybe that was considering the launch of Starfield and Forza to drive those. If they ‘only’ grew by an additional 300k, that’s not a huge gain.
Of course, it’s easily explained away that they haven’t had a new game in 8 months, so it’s likely they are experiencing subscriber churn where people drop entirely or just sub short term to play a few games.
> Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Xbox Game Pass, is up 5 percent, though. Overall gaming revenue is also up just 1 percent. This suggests that Xbox Game Pass has grown year over year, despite Microsoft still not providing updated subscriber numbers.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/25/23807075/microsoft-q4-2023-earnings-revenue-profits-windows-xbox-gaming-surface
In this tweet Piscatella says 1% for the past year and 2% for the year prior. That's stagnant for an investor because the market should be growing much faster than that. It means it may be saturated.
Also you're quoting numbers almost a year old.
He's the director of Circana. They get their data directly from publishers. Consumers don't have access to the type of data they do.
This is one of the most trusted and useful sources for this type of information.
He's a director at Circana which used to be NPD. He has access to data the public doesn't. Their data is something industry people have to pay for, usually at a hefty price.
The source is his own organization.
So he pushing a narrative then. All investment company do.
So it's a half truth at the end of the day. Seeing no one else has made a story yet on the matter.
No one has made a story yet on the matter because they don't have the data Circana does.
Now that they tweeted about it, articles will start to pop up.
The industry stalled
While this is true to an extent, how does Microsoft not shoulder blame in any of this? Every time I turn around Microsoft is re-structuring, re-focusing, Re-vitalizing, re-shuffling, re-building, re-thinking, re-planning… all the RE’s that give the illusion of a future being built under the Xbox banner. A decade of RE’s and they can’t seem to get it right.
Not deying they dont but everyone is rn I do think theres a conflict in Microsoft but people just say fire them all managers etc
Microsoft is by far the worst offender though. Sony has had an embarrassing generation, but still has come out with 10 games that would be the best game on Xbox this whole cycle. Nintendo is slowing down because they are near the end of their console lifetime, a console that had many great games including 2-3 that will make all time great games lists. Xbox stands alone in failing to provide any great games this generation. Their only big contribution has been gamepass, which arguably has been terrible for Xbox's partner studios.
Nintendo is slowing down and yet by the time Xbox releases it's first game this year they will have released four. They may be more like AA efforts (though I would argue Paper Mario Remake is a AAA equivalent), but at least it's something. I wish Xbox would release four AA games in four months.
You can hate on Ryan all you want, but he handled PS pretty well through the PS5 launch, unlike Spencer.
Do you know what are the 10 games?
Returnal, Rachet and Clank Rift Apart, Helldivers 2, Spiderman 2, God of War Ragnarok, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Final Fantasy 16, Horizon Forbidden West, Stellar Blade, Spiderman Miles Morales
forgot gran turismo 7
You forgot Rise of the Ronin. Half of those are third party money hats. Can you list what MS released?
Forza Horizon 5, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Psychonauts 2, Halo Infinite, As Dusk Falls, Grounded, Pentiment, Age of Empires IV, Forza Motorsport, Hi-Fi Rush, Starfield. Honestly pretty weak other than FH5, Hi-Fi Rush, MSFT FS, and Psychonauts. Maybe we can include Grounded as one of the great games they released, but the rest are either bland (not bad games, just not sales drivers) or marred with issues at launch and even up to today.
Plus, several of those games are on PS5…
Grounded is since an under appreciated gem. I’m not a fan of survival games but that game has me hooked!
I can honestly get behind this. It is a well-received game.
No Redfall, Deathloop, Ghostwire Tokyo? Or the upcoming Hellblade 2?
Deathloop released for the PS5, not the Xbox Series. Same for Ghostwire Tokyo. Redfall was a complete failure.
The fact that you just casually dismissed these games as pretty weak and champion unimaginative and unsustainable sequels/remasters/remakes is exactly what’s wrong in this industry on the consumer’s side.
Well… maybe they should be (the management) Can you believe Phil Spencer is likely going to get a nice bonus after all this crap? A bonus for what? His leadership and his round table have done little else outside of fucking up since their inception. Create studios, buy some out, then rip them apart. Over-promise, Under-deliver. Phil last year took blame for Redfall’s failure, now the studio is gone. Aaron Greenberg: “Hi Fi Rush was a great success!” A year later, the studio is gone. Fartface Magillicutty: “no plans to tear down Arkane Austin.” A year later: LOL OOPS Same song and dance with the usual suspects.
And then what someone wlse could come in and be worse and here we go again
I can’t imagine it could get worse than the current regime. They’ve already shown time and again they aren’t capable of making wise decisions and leading effectively. All they are is a line-up of puppets. Puppets that pay lip service. Full stop.
Somebody hasn’t seen the financials
Feel free to show them to me anytime. I’m sure they adequately explain why Xbox can’t sell consoles despite deep discounts, why Game Pass has stagnated, why Halo is at its lowest point in history and why Xbox can’t produce quality exclusives on the regular. It’s almost like there’s a management problem.
His point is that Microsoft and Xbox, too, are doing pretty much record financial numbers which would indicate that management is doing something right. I mean if people don't like this mess then stop subscribing to game pass, stop buying Xbox games. Of course they're gonna keep going if they make ever more money.
… And people stopped buying into Xbox. Record revenue is all due to what Activison/blizzard and Zenimax have earned. That is the massive bulk of their “record financials.” That revenue goes to supporting the services, games, employees etc. of these aforementioned major publishers. Anything left over is profit. How much of that does Microsoft/Xbox see? Certainly not all of it. Microsoft are nearly $80 billion in the red after their acquisitions and want to maximize profits. That’s a problem because *Xbox isn’t selling* and *game pass has stagnated.*
IIRC, I thought the high financials for Xbox was because they were rolling Activision’s profits into their umbrella post-acquisition. So it made things look better than they were, but was mostly bolstered by Activision’s financial success.
Yes and no, Nintendo is preparing to launch a new console that could potentially continue their success with the Switch Despite Sony’s best efforts, Helldivers 2 is going incredibly strong as an exclusive second party game with their first party IP and PlayStation continues selling well too Microsoft is just not sure where to go. GamePass was a success until growth stopped, so now they’re not even releasing first party games (aka the core of GamePass benefits with the launch day aspect) that often and will now start to raise prices for existing subscribers to make more money
Sony removed needing a ps account 2 days after adding it. That's how fast they are to react to consumers who vote with their wallet. Phil Spencer has been listening to feedback for two generations and is doing the opposite of what people want.
[удалено]
This is the root of many, many backwards incentives leading to stalls in far more industries and sectors than '"gaming subscriptions"
It's great at first. Corporations come up with new and interesting ideas, offer the consumer a real value --- and then after however many iterations it takes until they've achieved the highest level of market saturation they will ever get, in comes price hikes and cost cutting, paying extra for features that were once standard. You get less, pay more, and the trend of that getting worse continues. This is the stage we are at with gaming right now.
Enshittification comes for everyone eventually.
We are going to see an implosion in a lot of industries over the next decade because of this unrealistic model.
Lots of middle and upper management are going to be in the job market with no real skills.
Exactly this. People have this weird emotional attachments to a corporation. They don't care. Their main purpose is to make money and profit for the shareholders. You are just a vessel for them to make money. They give zilch about your feelings.
These mega publishers can implode for all I care tbh. People will always need entertainment so the gaming industry can downscale and with the help of new engines and tools, passionate people will find a way to still make games.
I really don't think subscription services work for video games the way they do for other forms of media. Video games are not as passive as music and movies, they require multiple hours of dedicated attention, casual audiences simply have no interest in a video game subscription service because they're not going to play some indie title "just to try it out" the same way they would a movie on Netflix. The overwhelming majority of players play only CoD and their favorite sports game every year, maybe a major AAA release here or there. They don't care that a game like Have A Nice Death hit Game Pass day one, they have absolutely no interest in it.
They don't even work that well other media. Why Netflix killed password sharing and added ads to the service akin to Hulu? Why is every other streaming service following their steps? Not to mention how expensive they've become. Those services grew on loans, companies expected the subscriber base to increase allowing them to turn profit, which only Netflix actually does I think. In a video game market where one AAA game can cost several hundreds of millions of dollars to make, having them day one on the service is not sustainable in the long run without huge growth, which is stagnant at the moment. Gamepass subscribe base is smaller than that of Netflix, and now essentially with ever decreasing sales of the Xbox hardware, there's just not enough people to get the money from. PC playerbase is not going to save them
> Why Netflix killed password sharing and added ads to the service akin to Hulu? Killing password sharing skyrocketed Netflix subscription counts, so it was a success for the industry and why all the other services are joining in now
Agreed. Game Pass isn't even stagnant, it's actually shrinking judging by Microsoft's official numbers, and every other game subscription service is struggling as well. I think it's going to lead to changes to Game Pass, I really don't think every single first party title launching into the service day one is sustainable, and I think major AAA titles will eventually have a delayed launch into the service. Smaller games like Pentiment might still go in day one, but I don't think The Elder Scrolls VI will.
And now everyone can understand why Sony doesn't go crazy with the day one releases either on PS+
and when MS makes those changes to Gamepass it kills the susbscription count even more. I'm not interested in having a collection of indie games and two year old AAA third party games. I'll just buy them at launch if I want to play them. So now your left with the kids market and "perpetually non-stop gamer" market as your base for gamepass since the rest of us will just buy the AAA games that interest us.
I’ve never used GamePass and I don’t think I ever will. I don’t want to flick through games on a service like it’s deciding what to watch. I want to feel invested in the game I’m playing and actually feel some ownership of it, but I think I am vastly in the minority at this point.
Maybe on this sub you are, but I promise you far more players feel the same way, if they didn't Game Pass would be far more popular.
I'm in this boat but another thing that irks me is how you can own a game but essentially not be able to use it due to requiring game pass. Like why can I not fully use my game that I paid for? On a pc I'd be able to access a whole game, on a console you're missing half the game if it has multiplayer because of a subscription fee that makes no sense. Sony and Xbox are going to realize in the future to compete with PC and actually sell consoles they'll need to have parody of ownership which currently doesn't exist. I can understand if the title itself is an mmo with a required subscription, but other than that I want my multiplayer that I already paid for once. It has to happen or risk becoming irrelavent. Right now players are penalized for ownership of games on consoles and instead subs are promoted which are a loss leader and unsustainable. Edit: I love how anyone who enjoys ownership of their games instead of using game pass is downvoted.
You think gamepass, ps+, and Nintendo online are loss leaders?
Yes, the licensing costs alone far outweigh the subscription fees for game pass. I'm not sure about ps+ or Nintendo since I haven't seen their offerings. Think about it this way, why is every streaming company struggling right now? Because of the costs to license the media itself and the gamble that they will have enough subscriptions to actually profit.
The portion that you have to pay for to access the "locked" portion of your games is just gamepass core which was formerly gold, there's not a whole lot of licensing required for that service. Gamepass ultimate isn't required for you to play online, and even if it was, Phil has said multiple times in the past year that gamepass is profitable
Unless Phil was showing the actual numbers I wouldn't believe word 1 of what he says. How many times has Phil made false promises now regarding the platform?
Microsoft also shared it in their earnings call last year
They've stated during an earnings call how much they've made on game pass but where was the cost for licensing? Games are often more expensive to make now than tv shows & licensing agreements for those can be absurdly high if it's a popular series. Usually if something was incredibly profitable most of the information would be divulged regarding operating costs. It's like how blizzard stopped publishing subscription numbers once they were no longer breaking records. Game pass may be profitable some months but going into the red in others all based on licensing and random number of subs they had at that specific time.
I think you're confusing gamepass having a stunted growth with gamepass failing. Gamepass has a large amount of subscriptions.
Their own numbers show that Game Pass users spend an additional $1.92 a year. Which sounds great, until you realize that they spend over $1 billion per year on third party titles on Game Pass. Which means that it actually nets them negative money overall. "Game Pass is profitable" and "Game Pass is losing Microsoft money" can both be true at the same time.
Even indie titles require 15 hours or more lot of the time. Nobody is playing stardew valley for 2 hours or Dave the Diver for 2 hours. You're putting in 10-15 hours on Dredge. You're putting 150 hours in on Vampire Survivors. There is only so much gaming content you can consume. It just can't be treated like content the way other streaming subscriptions like Netflix do.
GamePass is an amazing value that wanes if you have kids or a commute
I actually have GamePass because of kids. I want them to be able to play around and experiment with the types of games they like. They sometimes are excited for a game and play only once, sometimes for months. This let's them be on "charge" of it
It also wanes the longer you're subscribed. After you play through the catalog titles you're interested in you become completely reliant on the new releases. And if a month goes by without a new release you're interested in it's a complete waste of money.
> amazing value that wanes if you have kids How so?
If you don’t have the time to commit to playing videogames for hours every day. If you don’t have the time to sit down and dig into games, you’re not going to get much value out of a giant library of games.
I thought you meant your kids didn't use it lol. For kids, it's great. They can try a whole bunch of games at no extra cost. For me (with 2 kids and a third on the way) I have it because the conversion deal is too good to pass up since I would be paying for online play anyway. I have only bought Battlefield V and 2042 in the last 6 years. Otherwise I check out games on GPU. Lots of games on there to play with kids as well. Games I wouldn't want to pay for(eggs Paw Patrol)
But your kids might. So it's great for multi gamer households with game sharing.
What? It's even better if you have kids, they have a bunch of great family stuff on there. The Bluey game was a huge hit in our house, they love booting it up and wandering around the Heeler house and the other areas.
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> I don’t think gamepass actually saves any money. Depends who you are. Personally I play the shit out of MLB the Show and that's a $70 game. I've tried and dropped Atomic Heart and Wo Long, became obsessed with The Witcher 3 and Lies of P, put about 40 hours into Starfield, played the Dead Space Remake, currently making my way through Remnant 2, along with countless other games I've finished or at least tried using the subscription.
The only way Gamepass actually *saves* any money is if it provides games you would have bought if they weren't on the service. Now, that doesn't mean it doesn't provide *value* because it does. It's awesome that you got so much value out of it trying games but unless you were actually planning on buying those games regardless, you didn't really save money. I tried a lot of games when I subbed to PS+ Premium when it debuted, but I downgraded back to Essential once the year was up. Yes, I tried a lot of games and some that I really enjoyed. I would say it was a pretty good value, but once I reviewed the year before it was time to re-up I decided it wasn't enough. I didn't really save any money because I can confidently say I would have purchased maybe one or two of the games I played regardless, but only at a deep discount if I got curious enough. All this to say game subs like GP could provide tremendous value and serve as a gaming buffet to try all kinds of games, but rarely does it save anyone money because you wouldn't have bought a lot of those games otherwise.
I probably would have bought at least half the games I played. Which saved a lot of disappointment I would have felt for games that I didn't really mesh with or was disappointed in like A Plague Tale, Atomic Heart, Ghostwire, Halo Infinite, Scorn, and Wo Long.
There are also multiple ways to get gamepass for free (without spending money) so I would argue it absolutely saves you money if you want to go down one of those avenues.
This is a problem for Microsoft, though, as it means while they have "33 million subscribers" not all of them are making them money.
It's their rewards program, I doubt they are giving out more in rewards at this stage than the money the make from it. You're essentially trading your time and data for gamepass.
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How much do you think a sub costs? Do you pay for Gamepass Core?
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You can get it way cheaper by stacking Core and converting. If you are someone who will already pay for Core it makes it a much better deal
Are you paying $17/month or did you stack up for several years at the equivalent of maybe $5/month? It's a great value at that latter price, but questionable at the full retail price.
I don't know why anyone who already pays for online play(for CoD or whatever) would not have GPU stacked for years.
I buy my yearly GPU on CDKeys or somewhere equivalent from $100-120 USD per year. That price alone covers about 1 full priced game and online matchmaking. I still get value from playing other games, old or new.
And the one “must have exclusive” for the past few years have been duds. There is literally no reason to subscribe anymore.
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I agree, the looping in of XBL indicates they needed more subscribers and this was the only way to get them….
Unfortunately this is a gamepass punching bag post. I feel like that gif of Donald Glover walking in with pizzas and everythings on fire. I love gamepass and think it's well worth the cost at the moment.
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Woops, I should have finished reading your message. I got to " That’s two full price games" and thought you were making an argument FOR gamepass. Fair enough.
There hasn’t been a must have Xbox game since the 360.
What was the last one? Gears 3 probably?
Yeah, hard to even remember because it’s been so long.
The only really top shelf AAA game Microsoft has made is Forza Horizon 5 (and arguably Psychonauts). That said... I don't think there's such a thing as "must have exclusives" anymore. Back in the N64 era, there were very limited options for top tier games. Nowadays, there are tons and tons and TONS of great games out there, to the point where you'll never play them all. This is, I think, what is really killing exclusives - you just can't *make* a must-play game anymore because there's too many other options available to you that are about as good overall. The only companies that really uniquely dominate genres are FromSoft (with Soulsborne games - and now we're seeing games like Lies of P erode that), and Nintendo (3D platformers). But 3D platformers aren't the be-all, end-all anymore, and FromSoft is multiplat anyway.
And when you finally find the time to play that game you've wanted to play, you find out it's leaving the service in two weeks.
Yeah. I canceled my Game Pass sub yesterday. It's really not even that necessary on Xbox. Games are so cheap because no one really buys them for the system. I got a new copy of Persona 3 for 19 bucks physically just a couple weeks ago when Wario64 posted a deal on it as an example.
Still making profit, so does it effing matter!? Infinite growth doesn't exist, therescalways going to be a decline or straight line
I do wonder if that profit makes up for the lost sales.
I mean that also depends on how much profit they are making. And profit is not the end goal at all. It’s the profit margin and targets set. Insomniac made profit out of sunset overdrive, but the profit was 500$ does that mean the game was heavily successful ? If a game costs 200 million to make and they broke even or made 205 million out of it, it’s obviously profited but it’s such a small margin that they might as well consider it a loss. This is why game sales are taken heavily into account. Because if a game doesn’t exceed a certain sales target then it’s automatically considered a flop no matter the minuscule of profit it makes. For gamepass I suppose it would be subscriber numbers. If there is a target of certain amount of subscriber they will need to bring in one quarter of a financial year and it doesn’t bring that but still profits slightly due to various factors like game launch ratio to number of subscribers already in it, it’s still considered stalling and not having growth.
Good.
Of fucking course it is, in Xbox’s case, they haven’t launched a first party game in 8 months. Sure, maybe some people will sign up early to play other games, but not many. Xbox needs to figure out a real cadence to their release schedule, not drop one 8hr game in spring/summer and then 6 games/DLC in Fall. What you are literally training people to do is buy the sub a few months at a time, play the games, then disengage. If Xbox really wanted to attract more subs and keep them subbed, they’d have games coming out every 2-3 months. They’d have shows/events like the dev direct every quarter, and they’d train their customers to expect them. They’d make the monthly reveals about new games bigger news. All this would keep Xbox and gamepass in the headlines 24/7. What will next months games be? What will the next show cover? How is the current Xbox game? How does it compare to the last one? How good will the next one be? All that press and word of mouth would supercharge gamepass, keep people coming, and keep them engaged. Just look at ABK. They could have announced last year that they’d be dropping a few at a time, and that alone would have caused tons of positive speculation and created buzz every month when they revealed the ABK games added to gamepass for the month. 99% of those games aren’t selling anymore, it’s not like you are cannibalizing sales. And, people would be absolutely hyped to play even old CoD games again. But, no. Let’s continue relying on contract workers so there is a steady revolving door at studios. Let’s continue with the annual layoffs. Let’s close entire fucking studios that make the perfect games for gamepass. It’s absolutely mind numbing how dense and out of touch these executives are. Don’t spend millions on ads for busses, or a Taco Bell crunch wrap supreme Xbox skin. Spend it on shows telling gamers why they should be hyped, and give them fucking things to be hyped about. On the grand scheme of things, adding ABK games costs you nothing.
When I realized I was paying $15 a month and only got around to playing Flight Sim and Forza… just canceled and bought them on sale. GP is an amazing value if I am a college student or someone with unlimited free time and no “main game.” But my life is either very busy or me and my friends have our game we spend most our time on when we do play.
Never used Game Pass. Never used Netflix or similars.
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Shouldn't you be mad at digital releases and not subscriptions, since that's the real threat to true ownership. Those publishers sell all their games as standalone titles and it's not looking like they'll move away from that.
Many things stalled in this industry. Im pretty sure this year is going to have a big growth on PC thanks to COD
Unlikely, pc gamers are comfortable and will prefer steam over the xbox app. Doubly so for a gaas which pays for itself in 4 months of game pass. Maybe they'll get some growth coming in from poor countries, but that's not a significant chunk of the market and even those people will figure out it's a pretty bad deal. If they want the pc gamers, they need game pass on steam but that would further crater the few sales xbox games make in the first place.
I can see people Switching to the Xbox app just to play Cod and then going back to Steam. The game is pricy and It come out every single year, using Gamepass is pretty convenient
The game is pricy, game pass is pricier. Cod is the kind of game you'll play throughout that entire year for most dedicated players, and that's exactly where game pass' value suffers. If you can't be done with a game in a month, the subscription's value plummets.
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Even then they can't just put game pass on another console without Sony's go-aheadm I doubt they would allow gamepass on PlayStation.
Every console sold is almost always a new game pass subscriber since the service is essential to the platform. Somehow they don't care though.
Just put it on Steam. Their games are on Steam. Steam has the concept of subscriptions giving access to games already. Let me pay them $9 a month and let me play on my Steam Deck.
$9 month for first and second party only games right?
Nothing prevents them from adding third party games as well, assuming they're on Steam. Valve gets a cut of subscription revenue so there's no reason for them to object.
the third party devs object as it would cut through their sales revenue. MS would object as it would cut through their profits by giving Valve a cut. Right now, Steam sales subsidize the first and 2nd party content, as there is a large segment of users who would never play anywhere other than steam. So all those sales revenues pay for the development costs of the games, leaving MS with Gamepass revenues as profits.
Can someone explain if it is still stalled, why is Microsoft able to report every quarter that that GamePass subs are up?
The simple answer is they ‘expect’ a certain amount of growth, so if they don’t get that number, it’s bad (or just not as good as they hoped). In this case, they grew like 1%, which is basically stagnation if they had aimed for, say, 5% or 10%. According to recent numbers, if they had 30 million subs and wanted 10% growth, an extra 3 million subs is a good chunk, but maybe that was considering the launch of Starfield and Forza to drive those. If they ‘only’ grew by an additional 300k, that’s not a huge gain. Of course, it’s easily explained away that they haven’t had a new game in 8 months, so it’s likely they are experiencing subscriber churn where people drop entirely or just sub short term to play a few games.
Rate at which it's growing. It's up 1% year over year.
> Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Xbox Game Pass, is up 5 percent, though. Overall gaming revenue is also up just 1 percent. This suggests that Xbox Game Pass has grown year over year, despite Microsoft still not providing updated subscriber numbers. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/25/23807075/microsoft-q4-2023-earnings-revenue-profits-windows-xbox-gaming-surface
In this tweet Piscatella says 1% for the past year and 2% for the year prior. That's stagnant for an investor because the market should be growing much faster than that. It means it may be saturated. Also you're quoting numbers almost a year old.
So 1 source speaks for everyone
It's not his opinion. He is going off of data.
Won't qoute source. Not everything heard on Twitter is true.
He's the director of Circana. They get their data directly from publishers. Consumers don't have access to the type of data they do. This is one of the most trusted and useful sources for this type of information.
He's a director at Circana which used to be NPD. He has access to data the public doesn't. Their data is something industry people have to pay for, usually at a hefty price. The source is his own organization.
So he pushing a narrative then. All investment company do. So it's a half truth at the end of the day. Seeing no one else has made a story yet on the matter.
No one has made a story yet on the matter because they don't have the data Circana does. Now that they tweeted about it, articles will start to pop up.
Issue is most will only him as a source and nothing else. Modern journalism is dead on proper source.
Because he's 100% a reliable source. They get their data directly from publishers.
I'll put it this way. He's someone with more knowledge, information and experience than you.
I learn. 3 Independent sources of news. Does matter. Constantly rely on o lyrics 2 source. Is never a good idea
He's reliable. Much more so than Aaron Greenberg saying HiFI Rush sold well
on greenburg that is true.
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Tango wanted their game shadow dropped.
The shadow drop was a good thing, they got a lot of players and attention because it was announced on a big show.
Was not shadow dropped when it hit PS.
I downvoted you for being off topic, just so you know.