At least microsoft will finally have games they own make their own sales charts lol
But I do wonder if they are willing to kill the revenue they will get from CoD by putting it i n gamepass. Seems like a big loss of sales, especially when theres no game next year. I also dont really see the type of people who only play CoD every year subscribing to gamepass to play it. Its a one time purchase for them for the year.
I have like 7 close friends that game, and 4 of them do nothing but play CoD year around. I just joked with one of them that he bought a Warzone 5 cause thats all he plays.
If im him im paying 70 dollars once, instead of 15 dollars a month to play it. The only way it shifts a significant amount of people onto xbox is if it were exclusive and its not ever going to be, just like Destiny and Minecraft. Some franchises are way too big to meddle with.
Same with with Diablo IV. Even if the Activision deal goes through this year I don’t see Microsoft putting a game of that magnitude on gamepass.
At the very least once this ABK deal wraps up, MS will get marketing rights to those games. The problem, I see, is if they'll do any (or enough) marketing for those games on their own, or just jumble them into general GamePass advertising instead. MS still has an issue with sufficient marketing of individual games IMO, it seems like it's due to them wanting to save on associated costs.
But marquee games like Halo Infinite, Diablo IV, COD etc. should be able to stand on their own and get their own marketing without needing to be squished into GamePass adverts exclusively or predominantly. More direct marketing for games like Psychonauts 2 probably would've gone real far to ensure it got more sales and players than it did.
As for COD into GamePass, I really don't know. Maybe what they end up doing, they make some Warzone scenarios based on missions and storyline segments from that year's mainline COD and those are exclusive to Xbox & GamePass players for Warzone, but otherwise they just release the main games as normal. Then 3 or so months later, they'll add them to GamePass, like how some theaters normally do (did) theater-to-video/streaming.
There's not only way too much money, but if GamePass ARPU isn't high enough (and it doesn't seem like it is), if enough of the $1 conversions, no limits on trails, no limits on MS Reward redemptions to GP subs continue to exist, they'll get some big GP sub growth but much less revenue growth off the service subscriptions, and at some point they need both. Day 1 for new COD games into GamePass might also dampen sales on PS consoles which again, wouldn't be as much an issue if GamePass ARPU was high, but it isn't, so that's a general net loss in revenue on top of the money they've already spent on the acquisition.
And yeah, MS as a whole can recoup that cost in profits in about shy a year, but the Xbox division can't, nowhere near, and they'll have to start pulling their own weight in terms of profit generation eventually. It's the whole reason Satya decided to keep the division around and pump funding into it to begin with.
I was hoping Klonoa would've made the top 10 like it did in the UK. Hopefully it still sold well enough that Namco just doesn't ignore the series again for another 10 years.
I've been thinking about picking it up digitally just to show support, tho I played through the first game a while ago.
