Matt Piscatella: Sub. growth has flattened & sub services account for only 10% video game spending in the US. |UP| Still stagnant & stalled.

Gediminas

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I would actually dispute the lesser known IP thing in China - its a very popular Gacha, and the IP is just straight up bigger than Persona in Japan and China (mobile is huge everywhere of course, but especially in those places) - and China is quite literally where the absolute majority of the sales seem to be from. Relink survived and thrived thanks to China and PC... which leads basically back to why everybody is porting to PC/Steam in the first place, they want the the gigantic market of people there to actually have the ability to pick up their games.

Still, mostly agree.
Can you show statistic with sources that Granblue Fantasy Relink survived and thrived because of china and pc?
 

kirby64

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Can you show statistic with sources that Granblue Fantasy Relink survived and thrived because of china and pc?
The Chinese (including Taiwan) represent some 60+% of Steam reviews, and Asia as a whole represent some 70%.

While obviously there's no general breakdown that we can hope to be completely accurate without actual publisher data, Gamalytic and VG insights generally tend to get within 20% or so of accurate sales looking across titles that have released their platform specific sales data, even really big ones like Palworld, so its probably as close as you're getting to any real answer.
So probably about 900k-1m+ sales on Steam as of right now, and about 500k at 12 days, so about half of the total at the time. Meanwhile, we know for certain across many different regions - Europe, the States, Japan - that Granblue was well behind the other JRPG releasing the day after, P3R - closer in Japan (as you might expect) but even there it's sitting about 60k behind physically. The other regions? Spain, for example https://www.gamereactor.es/ventas-e...3-reload-y-grand-blue-fantasy-relink-1107673/
P3R launched about 4 times higher, and Persona 5 Royal apparently returned too and outsold Granblue that week, although part of that is due to shortages.

In the UK:
The week of launch Granblue launched at 15, stuff like P3R at 2 and Suicide Squad (which actually did sell on console as opposed to its instant death on PC)

I'm using Persona as a comparison as it's at least somewhat comparable, it launched a day afterwards and we know when both reached a million. We know P3R is a good deal behind Granblue on Steam - about half or more accounting for every language - but it sold a million a week faster, so it must have done much better on Playstation in comparison, I don't think either of us believe Xbox contributed any significant sales here. In that context China and Asia contributed a significant amount of its sales, and given it had huge legs specifically on steam where it remained in the top sellers for quite some time (that appear to have finally died down recently) thanks to Asia. It had a good start and attracted good attention for what is effectively an unknown IP in the west, but it was never going to do well in comparison to Asia, where the ip is a long running and popular Gacha - and especially in China PC is just now and forever the required platform for sales, unless the Chinese government can be convinced to drop the limited game selection on mainland consoles.
 
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Gamernyc78

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Mat Piscatella from Circana/NPD says that the growth for gaming subscription services is still "stalled"​


 
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mibu no ookami

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It's why Sony didn't go all in on subs and emulate GamePass, which would have been a disastrous decision for the entire industry.

That being said, I think some element of subscription gaming is going to take root over the next couple of decades, but we have a lot of models at the moment.

We have B2P, F2P, and Sub. We have games that are GaaS and GaaS Hybrid.

The best-selling games are GaaS/GaaS Hybrid. And I think these right now are generally the antithesis of subscriptions. These people only really play 1 game at a time. This means that subscriptions are lost on them, outside of the monetization of Battle Passes/Seasonal Passes.

If someone wants to play ALL sports games throughout the year though, EA Play might make sense to them.
 

mibu no ookami

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Conversely, Microsoft going all in on subscriptions via GamePass was obviously a mistake now and people are starting to see that. They've devalued their own games especially as they tried to gin up subscription numbers with cheap introductory costs like sign up for a month for a dollar... (now 14 days)

To increase value they should have made sure that GamePass was an annual subscription rather than monthly, but again that would impact numbers.

The problem is Microsoft refuses to fund and develop system sellers because there is no value to a 200-300 million dollar game dropping into GamePass for people to play at no additional cost after only spending 10 dollars.

When/if Microsoft abandons GamePass, it'll rock the industry. And that includes even creating a new tier for their Day 1 games. That is the end of GamePass as we know it. Everyone expects the next CoD to drop in GamePass, but that's going to result in a massive loss in revenue for CoD and that's just looking at the people who already have GamePass that would have otherwise bought CoD by itself.

I think Microsoft will have to implement a CoD tier, that includes Day 1 purchases for probably 20+ per month and this will be the new Ultimate, while GamePass Core becomes just a catalog service.
 
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Gamernyc78

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Good, subscriptions are a crutch for bad products.

Make great games and hardware and that should be enough.
Thts all I want. Fleshed out games tht take advantage of hardware and advances the medium through innovation but also graphics innovation and fidelity.
 
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xollowsob

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There's a lot of shit here and in Matt's post. Is it 1% YoY or 1% of all gaming spending? 1% of gaming spending could be shit if people only spent £10, but not so bad if people spent £100,000,000,000.

Is the gaming spending for PC and console and mobile?
What is the hardware growth YoY for Xbox and PS? Is that higher or lower than 1%?
If hardware has increased 50% then that's dire for subs. If it has decreased 10% but subs are 1% growth, then that's good.

Either way, sub services are dead, like everyone said from the begging. It isn't sustainable. Netflix can churn out a series quicker than Xbox can make a game
 

Nhomnhom

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Mat Piscatella from Circana/NPD says that the growth for gaming subscription services is still "stalled"​



I bet Gamepass is still losing subscribers, PS+ still gets the momentum that comes from PlayStation hardware being sold and the quality of games on Gamepass is now worse that is has ever been and now it is also facing direct competition.

They bet everything on day one releases and then it turned out that those day one releases over the years were Redfall, Starfield, etc. Absolute failure.
 
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Gamernyc78

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I bet Gamepass is still losing subscribers, PS+ still get the momentum that comes from PlayStation hardware being sold and the quality of games on Gamepass is now worse that is has ever been and now it is also facing direct competition.

They bet everything on day one releases and then it turned out that those day one releases over the years were Redfall, Starfield, etc. Absolute failure.
And what we saw firy coming, mediocrity for the most part.
 

Yurinka

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That quote of the tweet is made out.

Matt said "non-mobile game subs", which means PS+, Ubisoft+, GTA+, GP, Nintendo Switch Online, EA Play, Amazon Luna and more I may forget combined and also specified for USA only.

We know that PS+ revenue, at least worldwide, grew more than a 1%.
 
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Gamernyc78

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That quote of the tweet is made out.

Matt said "non-mobile game subs", which means PS+, Ubisoft+, GTA+, GP, Nintendo Switch Online, EA Play, Amazon Luna and more I may forget combined and also specified for USA only.

We know that PS+ revenue, at least worldwide, grew more than a 1%.
Yes thts all Matt's info.
 

mibu no ookami

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Conversely, Microsoft going all in on subscriptions via GamePass was obviously a mistake now and people are starting to see that. They've devalued their own games especially as they tried to gin up subscription numbers with cheap introductory costs like sign up for a month for a dollar... (now 14 days)

To increase value they should have made sure that GamePass was an annual subscription rather than monthly, but again that would impact numbers.

The problem is Microsoft refuses to fund and develop system sellers because there is no value to a 200-300 million dollar game dropping into GamePass for people to play at no additional cost after only spending 10 dollars.

When/if Microsoft abandons GamePass, it'll rock the industry. And that includes even creating a new tier for their Day 1 games. That is the end of GamePass as we know it. Everyone expects the next CoD to drop in GamePass, but that's going to result in a massive loss in revenue for CoD and that's just looking at the people who already have GamePass that would have otherwise bought CoD by itself.

I think Microsoft will have to implement a CoD tier, that includes Day 1 purchases for probably 20+ per month and this will be the new Ultimate, while GamePass Core becomes just a catalog service.

@Gods&Monsters

Tell me I didn't absolutely call this?
 

mibu no ookami

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Are you Tom from The Verga 👀

If COD is Day 1 on GP, they will stop the Xbox consoles to stop the bleeding. They will have to offer it to the remaining customers but that's it.

I'm not Tom from the Verge, but I put a lot more time into analysis than most it seems.

When you follow things to their logical conclusions, you're right more times than not.

CoD is Microsoft's cash cow right now. CoD is bigger than Xbox. Sure you can put CoD on GP Day 1, but the price will reflect it. And they'll probably use that opportunity to shift Day 1 games in general to the Ultimate tier.

Microsoft is afraid of pulling the plug on Xbox because GamePass on Xbox is much bigger than GamePass on PC. Their software sales are still bigger on Xbox than PC. They get very little royalties on PC games because most people buy in Steam rather than the Microsoft store.

The GamePass experiment is over and the ABK deal killed it.

The warning should have been when Bobby Kotick said that GamePass devalued revenue. If Kotick wouldn't put CoD on GamePass, why would Nadella allow it, at least as it currently exists? Not to mention that so much of the CoD money comes from Warzone anyways and it is F2P.

We're looking at GamePass Ultimate jumping to 20 dollars a month (minimum) by the end of the year (or at least before the next CoD launches).
 
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Gamernyc78

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Gamepass is one of the most value destructive ideas ever introduced in the gaming market if not the worst.

The only way it ever made sense was in the contex where MS was trying to outspend Sony out of the market.
And the Achilles heel of Game development. You know thy constricted game budgets just to fit into the game pass model.