View attachment 691
I saw this on the other forum today. As the original comment suggest that all of the vocal Xbox fans wants is Free COD and Diablo on gamepass. Its not about if they strongly feel that MS should be able to own ABK or not. Its not about how taking a huge Publisher off the market can have an effect on competition or Not. Its a selfish need of I like this game but im too broke or rather spend my money on other things instead of buying this new version of X game every time there is a new version.
I swear, I hate this mentality of gamers that devalues the product and work being put into a game so they can so call get over on the industry. If this race to the bottom dont change soon, who's to say a new gaming crash wont happen anytime soon.
Yep; Rockkerboy was saying the same thing in the main Reset MS/ABK thread yesterday. "I just want everything in Game Pass." The same Game Pass, mind, that there's a dedicated thread for on ResetERA talking about using regional exploits (via VPN) to keep getting the service for free, to keep abusing the loopholes for $1 deals and keep doing the stacking trick beyond the 3-year period.
I think these people feel entitled to these games like it's a right, even a civil right, and that they should have access to these games even if they aren't able or willing to pay for them Day 1 (or wait for a sale to buy them for cheap). But what really kind of pisses me off is that they don't stipulate these same expectations upon Nintendo's games; there, they are more than fine with paying full price even 5-7 years later. They don't kick up a fuss about Nintendo "needing" to put their games in a subscription service, or port them to PC, or bring them to other consoles.
IMO the truth is that these people still do very much in fact care about console brand identity, exclusives, and the traditional model itself, but only WRT Nintendo. They want MS to buy up big publishers and dump their games into Game Pass because they know MS can financially afford to dump the money necessary for that type of strategy (and have been duped into thinking Microsoft are their friend and a charity).
They want Sony to emulate Microsoft's strategy 1:1 even though Sony as a corporation (and PlayStation as a subsidiary) have more in common with Nintendo's structure than they do Microsoft's (let alone their market cap and profit differences; Sony's market cap is 2x Nintendo's but Nintendo makes roughly 2x in net profits than PlayStation (IIRC). As well, both companies are dwarfed by Microsoft not just in market cap, but also revenue and net profits (where MS makes as much in profits per years as almost 1.25x Nintendo's market cap, and roughly 75% of Sony's entire market cap!!)
Modern day gamers aren't gamers. Like a poster on gaf said to another poster "If gaming wasn't an option you would be happy with a different medium" and he was dead right.
These politically charged, eternally offended, cheap-skate gamers don't give a rats arse about games, the industry or the hobby. They want everything for free, regardless of what it costs to quality. They don't care that games are always online because they don't care about the preservation of games because they don't care about gaming.
These are the parasites that I wish we could flush from the industry. They make up the vocal majority and companies pander to these fickle, feckless fanatics, who will disappear to the next fad as quick as they latched onto this one.
That's a great way to put it. Some of these people feel like gaming is a right, not a privilege. And even beyond that, they just "consooome" whatever is being fed to them, same way some people are with the MCU.
A good amount of people who want this deal to go through simply so they can get COD and all ABK games "for free" in Game Pass don't really see the value in those games the way they otherwise say. They either don't know or don't care about the history of the medium, and don't have any sort of cultural connection with games that they play. It's the new trendy thing they get to socialize about at the watercooler with their buddies, or what they feel can be useful for pushing their own form of social commentary through.
And I'm not saying those things are themselves necessarily bad; I'm not trying to gatekeep at all. But the fact a lot of people for which gaming equivalates to being a "cool snack" that they somehow love to do, but don't want to financially support through means which have historically worked and provided plenty of options for those wanting to spend cheaper
ANYWAY (and
WITHOUT coincidentally consolidating ownership of lots of big revenue-generating 3P content under a platform holder), are driving a lot of the discourse online WRT this deal, is somewhat appalling.
I think the history of the hobby, the history of entertainment and the history of media have shown us for hundreds, even thousands of years, that price as a value is never as important to people as is the perception of value attached to the quality of the work itself. As in to say, just because something is super-cheap, doesn't mean most people automatically gravitate towards it. Outside of really bad recessions or depressions, "dollar-friendliness" has never been the driving factor for a person choosing one thing over the other.
It's been really weird to see arguments in gaming the past couple of years hinge cheap value as being the most important factor, when actual market results show almost the exact opposite. The people who just want this deal to pass uncontested (or virtually uncontested) so that they can get everything for "free" in Game Pass, are either ignorantly or willingly aiding in what would most likely lead to an actual industry collapse.
Say MS get what they want with very little in the way of behavioral remedies, and no structural ones. They immediately move to put COD and other ABK games into Game Pass. In the short-term you're going to see more and more PS gamers go "Why am I paying $70 for this when I can play it in Game Pass?", so you'll see a drop in game sales not just on Xbox but also PlayStation platforms. Even some Nintendo gamers will eventually go the same way. Microsoft have said they have no inclination to raise Game Pass prices, but I think that's partly based on the belief that even if they do put these games in Game Pass, they expect people to keep buying them full-price on other platforms. But why would they? Aren't you putting those games in the service to draw those people to play them via that means rather than buying the game itself? So that you can get those long-term paying subscribers?
That leaves Microsoft forced to increase the cost of the Game Pass service. They do that, they get some drop-off, because people subbed for the service being cheap are going to drop it as the price goes up and/or loopholes are closed. But depending on how long they've been subbed, they may have now been trained to not buy games Day 1, or buy them at all. So maybe instead of waiting for sales on games, they just go with the cheapest subscription service out there. This actually now forces other companies to compete on who can provide the most content at the cheapest price relative to competitors in terms of gaming subscription services, but this is where Microsoft's size and revenue advantage from non-Xbox divisions starts to create problems. They
COULD raise the price of Game Pass to compensate for decreased direct sales...or they could choose not to. It doesn't really matter to them either way, because gaming revenue is peanuts to them as a corporation.
That isn't the case with Sony, or Nintendo for that matter. If they're forced to now compete in terms of subscription services due to MS leveraging acquired content for Game Pass, training expectations within gamers to prefer that model, there's little in ways of realistic terms that companies the size of Sony or Nintendo can do to decondition gamers out of those expectations within a short span of time, meaning they either have to take massive losses for some period of years, or hope that a gaming crash occurs to "shock" the customer base out of a failing model and to be more receptive of an alternative (at a quicker pace).
And there are two ways a crash would occur, in that scenario. Either ambition/scope/scale/quality of content within the services is scaled back to match the projected sub growth and revenue/profit amounts, or the companies now competing on the trained expectations of subscription services bleed away money faster due to no scaling back on that quality, but not seeing the returns in revenue and profit necessary to sustain the model. Either way one of those two things is inevitable because the longer the subscription service exists and becomes the focal point for how companies leverage their competitive angle in the market, the more people shift from buying games a la carte to consuming them through the service, and the service
HAS to account for the loss of direct sales revenue as an equivalent in gained subscriber revenue.
So in a future where, say, Sony feels compelled to push with competition via PS+ and has to train their customer base to consume via the service (which will have already been mostly done if a competitor like MS is leveraging XGS, Zenimax and ABK content for Game Pass Day 1 aggressively), and they have 4 AAA games coming out in a given year, they have to gain sub revenue equivalent to the sum of copies those games would have normally sold at fuller price, minus say maybe 10% of total copies sold (in this hypothetical timeline). Each of those 4 games being $70, selling 10 million copies near launch. That's ($2.8 billion * .9 =) $2.52 billion which, in a service averaging $60 per sub, would need 42 million full-paying customers annually to account for.
Which, current PS+ actually does but...that's current PS+
WITHOUT taking things to the level of this hypothetical scenario. Otherwise, Sony would actually need double that revenue, or 84 million full-paying customers annually. They'd
ALSO have to account for dropoffs in sales of all 3P games not in the service, because at least some portion of subscribers would feel non-compelled to buy non-service games Day 1 or even at all. The only possible means of preventing that revenue dropoff, would be to cut deals with 3P publishers to also put THEIR games into the service Day 1 or shortly after launch, which could go up to $100 million or several hundreds of millions for EACH game...and that's money Sony has to pay upfront.
Where is Sony going to get that money from? Their non-PlayStation divisions? Well now those divisions have to sacrifice their own stability for the sake of funding PlayStation and, unlike Microsoft, those other parts of Sony are not the behemoths that Office, Azure, or even Windows are for Microsoft. No, Sony would have to take the money from whatever they'd get from PS+ revenue, nullifying a good deal of sub revenue and profits along the way. It's either that, or Sony has to buy those developers and publishers, which again means a lot of money, and in some cases they simply won't be able to afford them...but Microsoft can. Apple can. Amazon can.
It simply isn't a sustainable strategy unless you're such a massive company you can take the losses through gaming for it, because gaming revenue is nothing compared to your real revenue & profit streams. These are companies that thrive off perpetually eating losses in markets that are very small for their bottom line, until they starve out smaller competitors much more dependent on the revenue & profit from those same markets, leaving the larger entity the only one remaining. These kind of companies don't have any need for their gaming initiatives to become self-sustaining in a normal span of time, or with modest resource investment; their goal for gaining market share
WOULD revolve around simply outspending smaller competitors and engaging in long-term pricing wars (verging on predatory pricing) to condition the current market and force smaller competitors to either leave, or fully revamp their models even if they worked perfectly fine for themselves & the market previously.
Anyway I think I'll call it here for now because I did sort of start to ramble and that wasn't the intent. But I just wanted to explore how this stuff could play out for the market if Microsoft get ABK on all of the terms they themselves want. Notice I didn't say "if they get ABK"; again I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with them acquiring ABK itself. But given the way its content can be leveraged (alongside XGS and Zenimax's), for things like Game Pass, and how that would strongly condition the market of gamers and more than likely push competitors to reluctantly compete on a business model they aren't financially built for...I do think any such acquisition needs some serious structural remedies involved, even if that's also alongside behavioral ones.
And, I still think those structural remedies can be mostly fair to the buying party. But they need to account for these worst-case scenarios and proactively implement measures to prevent those from arising. Behavioral remedies on their own will simply not be able to accomplish that; they're not made to.
