Yeah, if the goal is to please people then we’re going to see a repeat of the last 10 years. Even when Game Pass was the undisputed “best deal in gaming” it was controversial and articles constantly saw people saying it’d ruin the industry. There’s no pleasing everyone and that’s not the solution to Xbox’s problem. Xbox just needs to make its offering & vision loud and clear and to stick with it. Focus on their differentiators, focus on why gamers should care (what value it generates for them), and kindly ignore everyone else.
I guess that’s my current worry with Sharma. If she focuses too much of listening to the noise and trying to please the community (which is inherently not a monolith and wants different things (as you’ve pointed out even we do on this small corner of the internet)), then she might end up a little lost. Xbox needs a straight SHINING path forward right now even if the particular path chosen pisses some people off. We’ll see how she continues to lead Xbox. I mean it’ll really take a couple of years for us to actually judge her as a leader. I’m hopeful. If nothing else I think Microsoft didn’t choose who Xbox needed next lightly.
Well said, especially as the article goes on to say Starfield is selling at a better rate than the titles they compared it to.
In any case, I’d say it’s worth porting due to the fact it’ll receive support from BGS and modders, so will have legs by having some cool additions way down the line.
Dropping COD opens a slippery slope to pretty much phase out first party day and date on Xbox Game Pass. Also, it makes business sense to have COD in Game Pass as well. It goes both ways. There is no reason or guarantee to believe all those who play COD on Game Pass will buy it if removed. I think if they want people to buy games they should incentivize it like saying you will get 10 to 15 percent of GTA on Xbox or providing some real push to justifying buying.
I think a lot has been said on just why removing COD isn’t good one could easily say perhaps they shouldn’t have gotten ABK if the reasons for it is no longer working.
Come to think of it, since there is a discussion about the exclusive internally, wouldn’t that mean the past tweet was truthful then? I mean I feel some of us are still
But the past is the past. We have to wait and see and support.
Not every game is COD, in fact I even think, purely from a business perspective, that even Elder Scrolls 6 shouldn’t be on Game Pass at launch because it’s one of the few games in the world that can do COD numbers at launch.
Game pass works bc it is crazy. Start taking out 1st party games and it slowly just turns into any other sub service.
From a business perspective, I’m paying and COD/Elder Scrolls 6 are receiving money from me through my sub service. People are acting like xbox is giving these high profile games away for free. We are paying for them on a monthly plan.
Are you saying xbox could get more money out of me if I sub to ultimate AND buy COD on my own? Its possible, but I don’t want to do that.
You’re already making my point by removing games now. I’m not even going to push back anymore. They can remove COD and whatever they choose but if these games are going. I hope they are not expecting people will pay 20 or more. I’d probably be looking for a 10 dollar or lower tier and will see how they intend to grow it seeing their service is pretty much the only one growing significantly.
To me if these games drive the service growth and if they are not there it will be just like Sony’s service which started before Game Pass and was merged to PS plus. At its height it only reached 3.2 million before being merged, while Game Pass as kind of merged as well. The number was well over 25 million before that. Also, Sony can charge for online, but Xbox will face a tough time trying to when they go hybrid.
Yeah at the current price they just need gamers who only buy COD once a year to subscribe for at least 3 months and they’ll make $20 for GPU subs and $10 for PC Game Pass subs. There’s a lot of theoritical math here though. Like you can’t really know which of the millions of Xbox console & PC gamers were only going to buy COD for the entire year or who would’ve bought COD + another first party game or two or three. Like this year I think it’s pretty likely that COD casual gamers would also buy FH6 at or near launch price. Though unlike Netflix, Xbox is an entire platform, so they can also consider how Game Pass boosts engagement in the Xbox ecosystem overall. Maybe more playtime could lead to more Microtransactions or just people choosing Xbox as their preferred platform which leads to them buying non-day one game pass games on the Microsoft store. There’s also other stuff to consider like if subscribers consider that money freed up and feel more okay buying other games or spending more in game with Microtransactions.
It’s really all offset by how much they can make gamers lock-in and then they game only grow revenue based on increasing the price and gaming new subscribers. If a casual COD gamer goes from buying the game to play it on and off again to subscribing for just a month and getting bored then they’ve lost a LOT of money. I think there’s an interview of XGS talking about how GP takes the pressure off of their smaller projects, but for a pillar game like COD there’s probably even more pressure in building a game that’s both incredibly successful at launch and keeps interest for a year. There’s also increased pressure on Game Pass Ultimate as a service to keep subscribers wanting to stay subscribed for that entire year (this might be where a discounted year plan really helps).
Yeah, Game Pass has made their differentiator “all first party games day one & many curated third party games day one”. That’s how they got to be the gaming subscription service everyone talks about. It’s probably why people still look to Ultimate first and everything else second. Premium is fantastic value at a low price, but it’s also functionally just kinda generic and boring. Maybe if Xbox sold game pass on “first party games added to the service after a year”. But it didn’t. Compromising on that message would start to crack the trust on what people can expect from Game Pass as a value differentiator (and that already happened when the tiers took away day one games from the standard tier). They can if they want to. They could even switch to a promise of “All first party games in 3 months or six months on Ultimate and 12 months on Premium.” Eventually people would move on, but it’d be a long and painful road. Microsoft could do it but they’d really have to buckle down and commit. And they’d also need to really do a better job marketing Game Pass’s value differentiator as something else.
Thing is many like me stacked up on ultimate believing all first party games would be day one something I wouldn’t if I thought they could change it at any time. I would rather have just taken the core.
I think if the day one games are removed or delayed by 6 months or whatever people will drop ultimate as the games won’t be the hot thing then. The zeitgeist effect doesn’t kick in. I’d imagine people will sub every few months or just pick a lower sub level also one would expect that the games would have sold the best they can by then so I’d expect they would be put in a really cheap service, but will it grow Game Pass won’t it be just like EA service which isn’t growing.
In my opinion I think Xbox has failed on marketing game Pass despite this it has grown much slower. Game Pass growth has also been limited due to low console sales, certainly if they had close to a hundred million their subscription would follow being they’ve managed like an 80% of their base subbing. It’s also limited on Cloud because it is expensive and difficult to scale and then on PC. I think if Microsoft want to sell games, they need to market hard and incentivize gamers, they were doing some of these things before like the custom consoles, the wraps and so on. They also need to identify strongly with their games. Hi-Fi-Rush was for example a hit on TikTok and social media, it was trending for quite some time but the connection to Xbox was never there. Microsoft could have slapped Xbox all over it and that could have been the exclusive.
Fortnite showed games could be platforms and those game platforms could be used to promote the main platforms. I don’t know why for example there isn’t the epic games Store within Fortnite where their base is. I think Hi-Fi Rush could have done well had the game promoted Xbox in some way and made the viral hit be easily linked to Xbox.
Hi Fi Rush is a great example. It’s a really good game that got fantastic buzz online with the shadow drop, but Xbox for some reason just left it at that. They never capitalized on the great word of mouth. Then for whatever combinations of reasons they announced closing Tango, and ultimately sold them off. It’s a shame.
I don’t think the average person understands the Xbox of today or how many access points and different ways to engage with the ecosystem there are. It’s a major sore point and one that Microsoft struggles with because they (who aren’t fantastic with marketing) have to go against the grain and fundamentally redefine for a video game console brand even is. People only really understand that you buy the plastic box and then buy games on it. Day one games tied to a service, being able to play Xbox Cloud Gaming on any device, and Xbox play anywhere are crazy concepts to these people who don’t even really understand the video game industry as is. Then all the noise doesn’t help with gamers that do kinda understand it pushing against it because for whatever reason they want everything to stay stuck in the early 2000s.
Like I said in another reply:
I don’t know what Sharma thinks that is. I know what I want it to be, and I’m worried because there’s a lot of noise online deciding what it should be. But Xbox does just need to figure it out and focus on that. Sharma when she started said her job is to listen and learn about Xbox’s identity from people inside the business and the community, but there’s a lot of conflicting voices. She also can’t stay on the fence for too long. She needs to decide Xbox’s identity under her leadership and go full throttle in a straight line without stopping to please anyone that isn’t already happy with the direction. That applies to game pass as well as any other part of the Xbox business.
Was thinking more about the cod gp rumors. I think we forget every cod player whether they are on ultimate or buy the game are on some form of gamepass since they need online multiplayer. So even if you ONLY play cod every year and buy it, you are subbed to at least essential. Pretty sweet deal for xbox as they get nearly $200 usd from that player each year for game price and sub. Five years of that and they squeezed $1,000 out of that customer.
Helix is the wrinkle. If online paywall is dropped, this same player drops the sub and only buys cod each year, that is $70/yr or $350 over 5 years. Big drop off.
so how do you keep those cod ONLY players in some form of gp? Maybe something like the fortnite perk. Maybe the fortnite perk is a test for this type of thing. If this fortnite experiment is successful, maybe that deal runs out by the time helix releases and they do something similar for cod. Keep that monthly revenue rolling in.
On the other hand, if they buy Helix and 5 years of COD over 5 years instead of a PS6 and $350 minus whatever percentage Sony keeps, Xbox gets more from that person than they would have, and the person not spending for online might have more money to buy microtransactions.
Jez said he thought it was also a slippery slope, but he said with Forza Xbox had built it into Game pass in such a way it benefits it and one would wonder why they don’t just do the same for COD. certainly, COD is not synonymous with GamePass. Microsoft hardly marketed the game with game Pass, one would wonder just how much people played the game there. BO7 had a 50% drop in players compared to BO6 and had 18 million players even less than the normal buyers. I think the game will crater on its own in the current climate.
For GP, I’m thinking it would be okay without the day one AAA games. It should stick to games that would normally get lost in the shuffle, games that need that visibility help. It can also give perks/unique stuff to GAAS/Free games. With AAA in GP those smaller games get lost so it becomes no different than the regular open market.
Personally I would likely down grade to core(or whatever they’re calling it) because at that point I may as well wait to buy their games at a steep discount on Series X.
If the Helix speculation about online are true, I would then just cancel game pass completely once I upgrade and likely use Steam or third party code sites for new games. As Game Pass as it currently is(minus services like Fortcrew, Ubiclassics, EAplay, Cloud and perks) is the reason I stick to the Xbox ecosystem.
Well I see it this way… Take GTA6 for example. How many people with no plans to buy the game would join GP to play it (if it were there)? As far as I see it, anyone remotely interested in it is going to buy it. Sure if it were in GP you’d get a subscriber uptick but at what cost? The cost of GP would need to go up to pay for its presence and you’d only mostly be shifting full purchases to GP.
In other words I don’t the GP could carry the weight of GT6, especially when it is available everywhere. Likewise I am not sure it can carry the weight of multiple AAA games while supporting the smaller ones too, at least not in it’s current iteration. Some of this is also timing and age. GP can’t just become a behemoth overnight, but it might be able to slowly grow into it. Like it took years for digital to overtake physical and I’d imagine subscription over purchase will take even longer assuming it is carefully handled.
