New Xbox CEO Reportedly Told Employees That “Game Pass Has Become Too Expensive for Players”

MadMummy76 said:
I have a bad feeling that the industry is heading towards dropping the option to buy games altogether. It will be all subscription and only subscription. You want to play Day 1 title? You pay $29.99 for the first month, then recurring payment of $19.99 second month, gradually dropping to $4.99 / month. If you stop paying you loose access. If the subs drop bellow a certain threshold they drop the game entirely killing it.
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MMOs have been there for decades
 
MadMummy76 said:
I have a bad feeling that the industry is heading towards dropping the option to buy games altogether. It will be all subscription and only subscription. You want to play Day 1 title? You pay $29.99 for the first month, then recurring payment of $19.99 second month, gradually dropping to $4.99 / month. If you stop paying you loose access. If the subs drop bellow a certain threshold they drop the game entirely killing it.
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So you think they will try and Netflix gaming.. investors do LOVE RMR. But I don't think I would sign up for this at all.

Now if they did that for streaming services only.. and that was bundled into that tier of service then maybe. But console owners and pc owners that can run their own compute should be free from that scheme.
 
Brian_B said:
MMOs have been there for decades
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MMOs have a deep social aspect to them of additional value that stand alone games can not equate. That is the value od the MMO sub... well that and keeping kiddie trolls out mostly.
 
Grimlakin said:
So you think they will try and Netflix gaming.. investors do LOVE RMR. But I don't think I would sign up for this at all.

Now if they did that for streaming services only.. and that was bundled into that tier of service then maybe. But console owners and pc owners that can run their own compute should be free from that scheme.
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I would not be surprised if the next console gen would be the last, then it's only thin clients from then on.
 
MadMummy76 said:
I would not be surprised if the next console gen would be the last, then it's only thin clients from then on.
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We are headed that way with everything. Even corporate tools, Office 365 largely is going web based interface only for licenses even. It's bonkers.
 
Grimlakin said:
We are headed that way with everything. Even corporate tools, Office 365 largely is going web based interface only for licenses even. It's bonkers.
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It is, but it isnt, demand is there, people love it, companies, forget it, both feet in.
Its such a weird mentality, before running pcs / hardware to absolute trash, hardware a billion years old, and the whole company crying about not being able to buy anything to make anything better. MS comes in, services! Get your services here!! ... Money suddenly, no object... Becuase MS, and services! The clould is here!... Companies are a funny bunch.
Vocal minority exists sure.
Minority sadly.
 
good take by Paul Tassi


Take Elder Scrolls VI. Microsoft would lose a ton of sales on its own platform if it was day one on Game Pass, and who knows how much that might increase existing subscriptions, given that most Xbox players are either in or out already. So, you might need to give it to Sony where it would probably sell tens of millions of copies, and you would reap at least a lot of that as the first-party publisher. But then your coveted big release is practically a flagship PlayStation title, given its install base.

However, if you take Elder Scrolls VI out of Game Pass, you not only get 100% platform sales instead of a smaller fraction due to the day-one philosophy, but that could be enough to play keep-away from PlayStation and be the only console to have an enormous release like that. That is something that could move consoles in a significant way. Add Fallout, Halo and other titles, and you can see how this could reposition Xbox’s entire place in the market. I don’t think it needs to be every single game, but big ones? Some, at least.
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Marees said:
good take by Paul Tassi





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Cutting out Playstation... you lose a massive part of the console market there. But you may push native sales. And if they are doing a simultaneous PC release. I dunno. It needs to be part of a thought-out strategy, and I think a big part of that has to be where hardware prices are when the game is closer to release. You aren't going to move a lot of consoles if there isn't new hardware to be had and an X Box Series S costs $1k and the Series X is 1.5 times that. A good game will move consoles. I know I've bought a lot of consoles over the years for just 1 game... and many of those I never really expanded very far beyond that 1 game.

But... with that be enough, is the question?

Xbox is in a deep hole right now. Bethesda isn't exactly in a great spot. Starfield did... fine. By all reports, it probably broke about even on development costs, but wasn't a huge cash cow by any metric. It was definitely not "OMG Skyrim in Outer Space" like everyone was expecting. I don't have a lot of faith in anything backed by Microsoft right now, and especially in Elder Scrolls - particularly since Bethesda was hit hard during the summer layoff bloodbath.

If Elder Scrolls 6 can live up to the hype, and Microsoft doesn't shoot itself in the foot with something stupid (neither of which are sure bets) - then yes, this could sell some Xboxes. Or Gamepass subscriptions. Or sell decent console numbers if they allow Sony (or even Nintendo) to play along. But probably won't do any of these simultaneously to any large degree.

Trying to divine what the hardware and console markets look in 1-5 years if/when ES6 does finally release - I have no idea. And that plays a big part in what I think they should do.
 
Grimlakin said:
MMOs have a deep social aspect to them of additional value that stand alone games can not equate. That is the value od the MMO sub... well that and keeping kiddie trolls out mostly.
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There are untold number of games out there with that same, or deeper, social aspect now. Sure, it's not identical to what an MMO used to be, but it's still there. Even single-player games, with Discord and other 3rd party tools. They are just monetizing it differently. What used to be called a subscription is now called a Season Pass. And publishers have gotten very good at unleashing whales via IAP.
 
Uvilla said:
It is, but it isnt, demand is there, people love it, companies, forget it, both feet in.
Its such a weird mentality, before running pcs / hardware to absolute trash, hardware a billion years old, and the whole company crying about not being able to buy anything to make anything better. MS comes in, services! Get your services here!! ... Money suddenly, no object... Becuase MS, and services! The clould is here!... Companies are a funny bunch.
Vocal minority exists sure.
Minority sadly.
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It all comes down to OPex or CAPex. Is it a capital expense (hardware) or Operational Expense (License.).
 
Marees said:
good take by Paul Tassi





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Paul Tassi is clueless, yes, I've said it. His opinions are no better than the average reddit user's, his just happens to be published on big name legacy media.

It has been proven time and time again, that games pass is irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. Starfield was on it day 1, and it didn't loose a ton of sales. It is just a convenient excuse for unsuccessful games: "our game didn't sell because it is on games pass" BS! It didn't sell because nobody wanted it. If it was any good people would buy it. It is my theory that most Games pass users are the "wait for sale" types anyways, so being on it day 1 barely puts a dent on actual day 1 sales for successful games.

In the second paragraph he even contradicts himself. Why would it matter for console sales whether the game is on games pass or not day 1? If they stay away from playstation, which they absolutely should, then it will still generate console sales regardless if it's on games pass or not.

This is not a defense of games pass either on my part, I just hate it when pretend experts spew nonsense.
 
Uvilla said:
It is, but it isnt, demand is there, people love it, companies, forget it, both feet in.
Its such a weird mentality, before running pcs / hardware to absolute trash, hardware a billion years old, and the whole company crying about not being able to buy anything to make anything better. MS comes in, services! Get your services here!! ... Money suddenly, no object... Becuase MS, and services! The clould is here!... Companies are a funny bunch.
Vocal minority exists sure.
Minority sadly.
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Companies love it, because it is a smaller recurring budgetable expense, instead of one giant up-front invoice. But do actual users love it? I highly doubt that. Enterprise buys a ton of software licenses that never gets used, that's just a fact. So the actual users might seem like a vocal minority. They are vocal because they need to actually use for productivity the cloud crap that corporate was talked into switching to.

The latest app to get the cloud treatment is google earth. It is an indispensable piece of software for any kind of work involving maps. Now (or rather from 2027) the desktop version is being retired to be replaced with a 500% slower, enshittified cloud version, lacking many of the features that made the app useful and popular in the first place.
 
MadMummy76 said:
Starfield was on it day 1, and it didn't loose a ton of sales.
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How do you know?

It certainly didn't sell as well as they thought it would. You can ~speculate~ that it's because it was a medicore game (I haven't played it, but by all accounts, you are not wrong) - but most games (not all, just most) have the majority of there sales near release, and being a Day 1 Game Pass game certainly helped contribute to a loss of sales. But I couldn't say by how much. And unless you have some sort of insider info, neither can you.

I could speculate:

At some point, Starfield at 17 million concurrent players

It sold about 3.7 million copies on Steam.
In the first week, it sold about 150,000 copies on Playstation (no idea about lifetime)
And supposedly it sold about 1 million Xbox copies.

So... add that up and subtract from 17,000,000, and realize that concurrent players is very different from units sold.. and it leads me to believe that Game Pass had some significant play for Starfield

Now - even with all that data, there's no telling how many of those Game Pass players really were a lost sale - many could just be checking it out because they had access to it. Or how many people signed up for Game Pass just for access to Starfield.
 
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Brian_B said:
How do you know?

It certainly didn't sell as well as they thought it would. You can ~speculate~ that it's because it was a medicore game (I haven't played it, but by all accounts, you are not wrong) - but most games (not all, just most) have the majority of there sales near release, and being a Day 1 Game Pass game certainly helped contribute to a loss of sales. But I couldn't say by how much. And unless you have some sort of insider info, neither can you.

I could speculate:

At some point, Starfield at 17 million concurrent players

It sold about 3.7 million copies on Steam.
In the first week, it sold about 150,000 copies on Playstation (no idea about lifetime)
And supposedly it sold about 1 million Xbox copies.

So... add that up and subtract from 17,000,000, and realize that concurrent players is very different from units sold.. and it leads me to believe that Game Pass had some significant play for Starfield

Now - even with all that data, there's no telling how many of those Game Pass players really were a lost sale - many could just be checking it out because they had access to it. Or how many people signed up for Game Pass just for access to Starfield.
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You're right I don't know, but neither does Microsoft, since in order to find out we'd need an alternative universe to check what happens if it's not on games pass. So best we can do is an educated guess. One thing is for sure, it's not enough to tank a game that would be a success otherwise.

Starfield opened at 330k players on steam, that's a pretty big hit. Anything over 100k is for single player games. And it still pulls thousands of daily players 3 years later. Which is not bad. Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 barely hit one tenth of that despite being newer.

It doesn't really matter how many people installed starfield who already had games pass. When I had it I also installed a bunch of games I'd never have bought. What would be interesting to know is how many extra people signed up for games pass around starfield's launch.

BTW, I liked Starfield, I think it was far better than mediocre. I've spent more hours in it than fallout 4 or skyrim. It is exactly how I'd imagine Fallout 4 in space. People were upset that you couldn't manually land on planets in it, like in no man's sky. I think that's a completely unreasonable comparison. It never bothered me. Landing is a loading screen, so what? So it is in every beloved Mass Effect game.
 
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