MS President Brad Smith: In Europe, PlayStation has 80% Marketshare, Xbox has 20%. Globally it’s 70/30
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The same day you fell sorry for Jez he basically started a fake news crusade against the Baldur Gate 3 devs including creating narratives that his sources were better than dev own words.
The devs had to make an official claim against him and after even had to ask him to correct him twisted article lol
The developer humiliated him on Twitter.
I really don’t feel sorry for him.
And while Xbox management uses him for some “leaks” and the fan Xbox base support him nothing will change.
He is a console warrior Xbox fan disguised as journalist.
No one should feel sorry for those idiots who continue being Xbox cultists.
They make it a bigger laughing stock than it already is.
There's cool Xbox peeps, then there's Jez.
The good ones are able to criticize Xbox and not defend the living shit out of bad practices.
I can't wait for this deal to be over.
Same, can't wait until maybe a few months afterwards and the news starts to fade away.
The only strategy here is that Xbox is on financial suicide watch list putting all their games day one on GP with the hope of growing GP and they keep dropping dozens of billions to grow its catalog with the hope that it would kill the competition and that they'd survive with the money from other divisions, and then they'd change their business model to try to turn their gaming business into something profitable.
The thing is, Sony keeps dominating them in consoles and game subs, GP doesn't grow that fast and that they'll need to keep publishing on rival consoles because selling games (and addons) for them is where the AAA/AA money is, not in game subs or cloud gaming.
Having their servers here or there, or if they save some bucks by owning the server or the app to manage them doesn't matter. It's a tiny cost compared to hundreds of millions that every game costs, and the dozens of billions they spend on acquisitions.
No, PS Cloud gaming uses propietary Sony server cloud made with PS3, PS4 and PS5 hardware that only Sony can build. They can't use Azure or AWS servers for that.
For websites and services like the shop, PSN friends/trophies/messages/etc. yes, they can use AWS/Azure/Google Cloud/whatever in addition to internal servers like everyone else.
Yeah, that's one of the many pure PR bullshit from Phil. But everybody knows, including him and MS as clearly stated to the regulators, that this is complete lie and that their main competitor is Sony, who btw clearly dominates them in gaming as seen in the OP.
Amazon isn't betting seriously in gaming. They have a cloud gaming service in beta only available in a single country, a few internal studios that collected many fails and their PC game sub that even many gamers who have it don't even use it (at least in my case, I have Prime for Amazon shipments and Twich subs, most months I don't redeem their free games and after years I still have to play one of them).
It's the opposite, MS doesn't charge MS or Nintendo for having MS games on Sony or Nintendo consoles. The platform holder (Nintendo or Sony) is the one who charges a percent of the revenue made on their consoles by 3rd party publishers (like MS). In the case of digital game sales, dlcs, microtransactions, season passes or any other digital add-on, it's a 30%.
Out of every $100 generated by MS on PS, $30 goes to Sony. And if that player wants to play online multiplayer, also pays Sony the PS Plus.
The PSN cloud (or same goes with Nintendo) handles the matchmaking, friend lists, in-game chat, trophies, store, game downloads, updates downloads, etc. That cloud is stored wherever Sony wants. They can migrate it to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. and pretty likely they choose whatever offers them the best price. So in case they are in Azure and MS decides to raise the price, they can move to AWS, where pretty likely they may already have them.
That would be even more nonsensical and suicidal than to include AAA games day one on GP.
You don't get it: the publisher (MS) is the one who pays the platform holder for using the platform (PSN) servers usage and a portion of the revenue made by their games on that platform (PS). If in addition to paying for using PSN matchmaking, in-game chat etc. they decide to don't use P2P or PSN servers for the online matches and use instead game specific dedicated servers to handle the online matches, store metrics etc. then it's the publisher who pays these game specific dedicated servers, not the platform holder.
It's a nonsensical fantasy. These are companies trying to make profits.
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We agree there
A tiny cost that MS could make a significant cost to bring in some money so they can step back from the ledge of of financial suicide.
Sony use AWS that hosts their servers. Well, according to google anyway. It could be wrong, and that's not sarcasm.
Yeah and this is my point, if Sony can only use Azure - owned by their biggest competitor, there's no telling what Microsoft would, or could, do. Microsoft aren't known for playing nice.
Every 'leader' of Xbox has announced their strategy a few years before fruition. Moore wanted to chase "gamergirl" and did so. Mattrick wanted xbox to be the centre of the living room (also a Billy G idea) and we got the Xbone. Phil spencer, while a raving twit, has often said the quiet part out loud. This is one of those times.
I agree, Amazon aren't getting into the computer market for many reasons. And it's ideal that companies use AWS because Amazon have no reason to punish one company over another.
You're thinking games and with that in mind you are correct. I'm talking about the fees and accessibility of the back end
Today, that's great. Tomorrow, that may not be the case. If Microsoft removes those options and Sony's only choice is for Azure, things can go south very quick. I'm not saying Sony will never have the option to store their cloud stuff where ever they want, but if Microsoft host the servers for CoD, Sony needs to connect to those servers. The cost of doing that, or God forbid, the ability to do that would be controlled by Microsoft. That's the issue.
Not if your competitor is paying for the shortfall. I am 100% convinced that Bethesda games will come to PS5. Because Microsoft would make 30% of all games sold on Playstation, which would be millions, if not 10's of millions.
We're discussing two different things here and if that's because of my poor explanation then that's on me. I agree with and understand what you're saying.
What I am talking about is this: Right now, ABK games are hosted on AWS servers. If/When MS buy ABK all of those games migrate to Azure. Right now, ABK pay a fee - whatever it is, to Amazon for hosting their games. If those games were hosted on Azure, owned by Microsoft, the cost is absorbed within Microsoft and costs the xbox division 'nothing' (accounting foolery). The cost that Sony would have to pay to access the AWS servers isn't free, even if it's pennies, it's still a fee. Microsoft could make that fee, or the quality of the service, dreadful for Sony or any 3rd party who doesn't play ball and that's just ABK.
We saw a whole host of companies 'black out for BLM' where servers were shut down for reasons outside of gaming. We have seen countless games suffer server issues and face the backlash because of it. Microsoft could cease multiplayer X hours a week on rival consoles - if they so wanted, and nothing could stop them.
It was an extreme hypothetical to highlight the possible. If these companies are trying to make profit, Microsoft isn't trying very hard.
How profitable the Xbox business was/is in these 20 years?
I'm damn sure if it wasn't because MS has money to burn lying around like everywhere, that division would have gone third party publisher like Sega did long ago
And that's the thing about regulators looking at MS's long term plans, they consider cloud as a new market and they don't want 1 big player to take it for itself alone and dominate, aka avoid another Windows OS situation
People in the gaming circle are thinking like cloud is still born and won't advance in the future, so it'll stagnate and fail, but that we don't know, regulators should not be thinking like traditional gamers with their bias against cloud atm
Same thing happened years ago when mobile was thought to be still born so it wasn't cosidered a priority or important, now it's the biggest money maker in the industry and worst, because no one working on the traditional market cared for real about it, the mobile segment is a giant predatory scam with penny pinchers doing everything possible to monetize the games every way possible
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Very true. But i don't think Xbox would have crashed out without the warchest of MS. They would have had to adapt, and quickly, after the Xbone fiasco. Much like Nintendo did after Wii U or Sony with PS3.
Cloud and streaming is going to be force on us unless we can take the industry back from the money-men, Corporate ball-washing shills and normies. Otherwise, he who owns the method of distribution, owns the industry. Right now that looks like it could be Microsoft.
Mobile became such a predatory penny pinching scam that those same methods leached into Console gaming. It's no coincidence that King became a massive publisher in the market space, Activision bought them, then chocked CoD with P2W mechanics, loot boxes and MTX.
i wish another fad would come along and vacuum all of the insects out of our industry.
Maybe I'm being harsh on them, but that's because they didn't show much progress during all these years and that's with MS banking them hard, I'm mean the year is 2023 and they're still going with Halo-Forza-Gears
Imagine what would happen if they didn't take away all the future Bethesda games to make them exclusives?
I worked on some F2P games that had some dozens of millions of players, and their servers (including metrics, Akamai and other server related external services) did cost a few thousand of dolars per month. Basically the cost of 2 or 3 workers.
This is nothing compared to spending billions or hundreds of millions.
In the previous studio where I did work, our talented server programmers migrated the game servers from a platform to another (AWS, Google Cloud, internal servers, etc) every certain time depending on their needs or pricing to optimize costs depending on market prizes and active userbase. They also migrated their from a type of databases to another, and in other things. Over time, they even learnt to do it without needing to put the game on maintenance downtime: the players who were in a match when the change started remained in the old system, while players who joined a new match entered in the new server cloud / database / etc platform.
PSN has a much bigger scale and budget, so I assume they also must have talented devs capable of doing these things.
There are many companies offering server hosting, MS is only one of many. In fact, companies like Sony have their own servers. When they get other ones like AWS, Azure and so on it's basically because using them require less cost than to create an inhouse server infrastructure, to build datacenters in certain regions, create related apps to manage them etc.
I mean, let's say Sony wants to bring PS cloud gaming (something that needs to put servers close to the users to have good latency) to a few countries of the center of Africa. Let's say Sony doesn't have servers there, so they'll rent some space in some local datacenter (this is basically a building full of servers with a good cooling system, and local people in charge of maintenance etc) to store there their own physical servers. It may be from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or simply -something very common- an outsourcing datacenter company that hosts servers for AWS, Azure, Google and many other big websites like Facebook and so on.
In this case, even if Sony uses their own servers and not Azure or AWS servers for cloud gaming, in some countries they could store these Sony servers in a datacenter owned by MS, Amazon, Google, or a random server company.
The servers are not an issue regarding gaming, Sony doesn't compete with MS in that area, so in fact pretty likely MS wants to have Sony as customer because the server costs of PSN, Crunchyroll etc must be quite big. So pretty likely MS offers Sony a good prizing, as Amazon or Google may also do. If some of them asks for an abusive pricing, they won't care and will go with the next one because the services they offer are pretty much the same.
These big corporations may fight each other in a division, but can be important customers/partners of each other in other divisions. As an example, I remember that the Buzz! game series (European tv contest show made by Sony generations ago) did use stock images bougth to a Bill Gates company, back when he was in charge of MS. And Sony may use thousands of Windows, Outlook or Office licenses etc.
No, Sony doesn't need to connect to these servers, it's the publisher. If the publisher of a game published on PS desires to use their own dedicate server for online MP (or in-game metrics) instead of using P2P or PSN servers, it's the publisher who pays them. And if they use PSN servers, the publisher also pays them.
Same happens when publishing a game on Xbox or in any other platform: if you as publisher have dedicated game servers, you pay them. The platform holder won't pay for them. The publisher is also charged for using the platform servers (store, matchmaking, in-game chat, game downloads and updates, etc) in a way or another depending the platform, but typically it's part of the '30%' revenue cut of the sales related to that game and its addons.
Excluding physical sales -which have a different percentage- the revenue share of any digital transaction to buy games or game add-ons in Xbox, PS and Nintendo is 70% for the publisher and 30% for the platform holder.
Meaning, Sony gets 30% of all the revenue generated by any MS, Bethesda, Double Fine, etc game published on PS, while MS gets 70%.
The platform holder uses this '30%' to pay several costs of the platform being PSN server costs, customer support costs, maintenance costs, currency change/fee of using certain transaction services like Paypal and so on. And after substracting all these costs there's a remaining profit for the platform holder.
Which in fact, it's the biggest profit source for PS because there's a shit ton of -mostly 3rd party- games games and adddons sold -mostly digitally- on PSN every year. Console makers historically did use that profits source to compensate the loses generated by selling consoles at a loss.
As platform holder, Sony doesn't care where a publisher hosts their own dedicated server in case a publisher wants to use dedicated servers, since it's the publisher who will pay them and not Sony.
If a publisher wants to publish a game on PS they will be welcomed as long as the game works (well, exactly 'if the game passes the certification checklist required by the platform holder'). The platform holder will manage the game and addons sales and will give the publisher their revenue cut (70% for the digital transactions).
To keep dedicated servers open does require a costs of paying servers and their maintance, so years after the game release, after the game stopped generating enough money to keep them live, the publisher (not the platform holder) decides to shut down these servers.
it's crazy to think what XBone Series would be without bethesda. It's already got probably the worst lineup i've ever seen across any console, ever, full stop. Even Xbox One was better than this.Maybe I'm being harsh on them, but that's because they didn't show much progress during all these years and that's with MS banking them hard, I'm mean the year is 2023 and they're still going with Halo-Forza-Gears
Imagine what would happen if they didn't take away all the future Bethesda games to make them exclusives?
Maybe Xbox could be better today.
I mean if MS didn’t have the money to burn there are two options:
A) They left the game hardware business.
B) Adapted to make the business profitable like Sony did.
It can be weird but pressure and less budget makes companies more efficient and incentive the search for better ideias to reach their goals.
Xbox could be a way different today if it was a company that had to face pressure and work with less budget.
Sony took a shake up with PS3 and see what PS4 turned out? Basically was what saved the company from bankrupt… they were really in a dry situation with all divisions on red and Kaz assumed, focused on PS4, made profit that put on blue rails again and after stabilized could work again to make others divisions profit.
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Thank you for the information, the insider details and the excellent write up. It has given me a lot to think about. Genuinely, no sarcasm, I appreciate it.
According to papers MS submitted as a supporting party in the Epic Games V Apple lawsuit, Xbox has only ever posted two profitable quarters, non-consecutively, during the Xbox 360 generation, and by the middle of 2021 had LOST $67 BILLION since the division was opened in 2000.
Xbox was never about profit, it is about controlling the gaming market.
As shitty as Rise and Lococycle were, at least they were launch exclusives.
The closest thing Series had to a launch exclusive was the hilariously mistimed Rockstar Energy marketing for Halo:Infinite.