I didn't say they don't care about player numbers. But your contention was that player numbers are the only thing they care about, or that the player numbers matter so much more than other metrics of success, and I didn't see any evidence of that other than that's the only public information they've shared. I believe it's always a good policy to question the context behind numbers used in public relations. It's a completely reasonable take that they've shifted to presenting engagement metrics because other, more concrete and tangible metrics such as revenue and subscriber count aren't growing or aren't growing as fast as they'd like it to.
The f2p model only works on the back of microtransactions. Gamepass is different entirely, because it relies on 3rd party licensing agreements for content which costs money. It is not fortnite or warzone, it is netflix. And we all know netflix has been running at a loss for the majority of its existence. The difference is, investors were willing to continue eating the losses because the subscriber count continued to rise at a pace that gave them confidence. If this is the same model that gamepass is following, why doesn't microsoft talk about its subscriber count except on a very few occasions, and why is it that recently there's been a lot of talk about raising prices and the subscriber count reaching saturation levels on console?
?? They just had massive layoffs at bethesda and 343i. If Halo was doing gangbusters would that still be happening? If Deathloop had sold 10 million, are they still forcing people out at Bethesda? They also just completely shut down their metaverse division.
Ok, but you just listed a revenue loss on game&network services, if 159% growth on PC gamepass was such a huge amount then that wouldn't happen. It's like when they did a PR campaign about how well Xbox was doing in Japan and how they doubled their sales of Xbox in Japan and then turns out it's like 300,000 consoles total and they just complained to their paypig senators in DC about how Sony is a monopoly in Japan and has 96% market share.
I would describe it as "failing". They clearly had ambitions and a projection/model about how things were going, and maybe you'd be right if gamepass had followed those projections. If gamepass was able to successfully undermine Sony's market position and steal users from that ecosystem, that would clearly be a success for Microsoft's strategy. But they didn't. I think they're clearly trying to pivot away from gamepass being their main focus, otherwise zenimax and activision wouldn't be subsidiary divisions separate from xbox game studios. They might give it one last shot by putting CoD on gamepass but I believe if it doesn't do numbers it's going to be yet another xbox initiative that dies and gets buried.
Last edited:
