Xbox Q4 2023 (fiscal) earnings: Gaming rev. up 1%, Xbox content + services rev. up 5%, Xbox hardware rev. down 13%

[anonpuffs]

I don't understand how they gonna make money back with Game Pass. Even with price of 240 dollars a year it is still not possible.

The point isn't to make money off game pass, the point is to kill everyone else off.

They want to destroy the value of video games so that when a new game comes out, people don't default to "hey i'll buy it for $70" they default to "I'll wait for it to go onto a subscription service". They are trying to make it so that it will become impossible for pretty much any high quality game to make money - simply because Microsoft are incapable of making high quality games. Then, when all the other competitors fail, they'll be the last one standing, just by virtue of the fact that they are a 3 trillion dollar corporation.

 

[Muddasar]

I don't understand how they gonna make money back with Game Pass. Even with price of 240 dollars a year it is still not possible.

Full price on Playstation and simply getting more gamers on Gamepass.

Increase the price on Gamepass later having faith that most won’t leave.

Still in the short term they won’t be any profits.

 

[VillaiN]

Ms s covering xbox loses for last 20 years. They dont give a damn about xbox profits. Its a tiny division.

Short term Salty Nutela and Phil wants to show shareholders fake growth of division (remember their crazy goals like 70% GP growth) so they can collect tens, hundred of millions of bonuses for a few heads in charge.

Long term they want to use money to kill of competition. Once they do it, they can do whatever they want. They want to kill retail sales. They want to make studio, publishers, cloud providers dependable only on them. Sony or nintendo cant afford to pay billions to put games on their service. Or anyone else apart from apple. They might even lower their platform fee from 30 to 20%. Then publishers might pressure sony to do the same. Etc.

They literally said they want to outspend sony from market and some re still debating whats ms plan.

 

[Alabtrosmyster]

Full price on Playstation and simply getting more gamers on Gamepass.

Increase the price on Gamepass later having faith that most won’t leave.

Still in the short term they won’t be any profits.

If you are one of those 1 million or so people who only play CoD on their PlayStation going to xbox + gamepass will cost roughly 200$ a year to play CoD add what you'll spend on the in game transactions.

On PS you will need to buy the game $70... then whatever else you decide to buy.

Same for those who mainly plsy CoD, they may not want those games that happen to be on the gamepass library, so in the end they still need to buy games and cannot just default to paying for online access anymore.

 

[Plextorage]

This makes me happy

 

[ethomaz]

I don't understand how they gonna make money back with Game Pass. Even with price of 240 dollars a year it is still not possible.

Focusing on cheap game development projects.

I mean if you can have games at lower quality costing $20-30 million then you have profit with Gamepass.
It just won't work if you want to put the actual AAA games ($100-200m) there.

That is why we say "Gamepass filler quality".

AAA games on Gamepass today is just a thing to make people subscribe... it is not sustainable in the long run.

 

[Gods&Monsters]

Ms s covering xbox loses for last 20 years. They dont give a damn about xbox profits. Its a tiny division.

Short term Salty Nutela and Phil wants to show shareholders fake growth of division (remember their crazy goals like 70% GP growth) so they can collect tens, hundred of millions of bonuses for a few heads in charge.

Long term they want to use money to kill of competition. Once they do it, they can do whatever they want. They want to kill retail sales. They want to make studio, publishers, cloud providers dependable only on them. Sony or nintendo cant afford to pay billions to put games on their service. Or anyone else apart from apple. They might even lower their platform fee from 30 to 20%. Then publishers might pressure sony to do the same. Etc.

They literally said they want to outspend sony from market and some re still debating whats ms plan.

They literally said they want to create a Xbox store to put on other platforms (starting with Apple and Android). Once they force Sony to open Playstation after lowering their margins and opening Xbox to 3rd-party stores they will put the Xbox store on PS with all the content from Activision Blizzard Bethesda and more they acquire.

Sony will make zero dollars from any of it.

 

[Cool hand luke]

I don't understand how they gonna make money back with Game Pass. Even with price of 240 dollars a year it is still not possible.

They won't. That's not the point. Everyone knows subscriptions aren't sustainable - see the TV/movie streaming wars. It's about devaluing a competitor's business model and tanking the market because you can't win. The equivalent of throwing a tantrum and flipping the chess board over.

 

[Box]

Clock is ticking for Xbox hardware and only Microsoft is to blame for that.

- Instead of shipping consoles to consumers when there was demand, they put the hardware into their cloud infrastructure. The few consoles that were available, were often tied to Xbox All Access plans and you could not buy the console outright - at least here in the EU

- Now the times are more difficult and Xbox raised the price when at the same time their much more succesful competitor cut the price. Now there's a 100 € price gap resulting in even less demand for Xbox hardware.

- MS completely **** the bed with their first party output, partnerships and marketing for at least a decade. There's almost no advertising and all of the big IPs are tied to PlayStation. Marvel, Star Wars, Fifa, Avatar etc.

It's not going to get better. I expect it to get much worse and I don't think Starfield or any acquisition of any multiplatform publisher is going to save the Xbox hardware division.

I'm still not convinced Starfield is going to be the success that everyone expects. I can already see the PR drama if the review scores are lower than expected.

 

[historia]

Clock is ticking for Xbox hardware and only Microsoft is to blame for that.

- Instead of shipping consoles to consumers when there was demand, they put the hardware into their cloud infrastructure. The few consoles that were available, were often tied to Xbox All Access plans and you could not buy the console outright - at least here in the EU

- Now the times are more difficult and Xbox raised the price when at the same time their much more succesful competitor cut the price. Now there's a 100 € price gap resulting in even less demand for Xbox hardware.

- MS completely **** the bed with their first party output, partnerships and marketing for at least a decade. There's almost no advertising and all of the big IPs are tied to PlayStation. Marvel, Star Wars, Fifa, Avatar etc.

It's not going to get better. I expect it to get much worse and I don't think Starfield or any acquisition of any multiplatform publisher is going to save the Xbox hardware division.

I'm still not convinced Starfield is going to be the success that everyone expects. I can already see the PR drama if the review scores are lower than expected.

Despite only having 8% marketshare, Xbox making 70% of gaming news headlines.

I don't pity them one piece if they got nuked back to hell.

 

[Box]

Despite only having 8% marketshare, Xbox making 70% of gaming news headlines.

I don't pity them one piece if they got nuked back to hell.

They have been a burden on the gaming industry from day 1. Everything would have been better without them

 

[Alabtrosmyster]

Full price on Playstation and simply getting more gamers on Gamepass.

Increase the price on Gamepass later having faith that most won’t leave.

Still in the short term they won’t be any profits.

If you are one of those 1 million or so people who only play CoD on their PlayStation going to xbox + gamepass will cost roughly 200$ a year to play CoD add what you'll spend on the in game transactions.

On PS you will need to buy the game $70... then whatever else you decide to buy.

Same for those who mainly play CoD, they may not want those games that happen to be on the gamepass library, so in the end they still need to buy games and cannot just default to paying for online access anymore.

They literally said they want to create a Xbox store to put on other platforms (starting with Apple and Android). Once they force Sony to open Playstation after lowering their margins and opening Xbox to 3rd-party stores they will put the Xbox store on PS with all the content from Activision Blizzard Bethesda and more they acquire.

Sony will make zero dollars from any of it.

There would be no point in making games consoles the way they are today.

On the other hand, everything would be forced to be developed as an open platform where everyone can publish stuff anyway they want. Would Sony be forced to make dev kits and the likes be available on demand to anyone who cares to ask for it? Would it mean that platform holders cannot limit in anyway what games/apps are made for their platform? Do they have to modify their OS so that you have a way to install apps from other sources? (Store or no store).

I can wait for bit defender PS edition .

On the other hand, VLC, retroarch and what not are always welcome.

 

[Papacheeks]

They have been a burden on the gaming industry from day 1. Everything would have been better without them

I 100% Disagree. When Xbox was started it was done by a scrappy team from Direct X people. It was started with courting PC/Graphics developers back in the old days of sioftware meet ups.

Sega had input on their controller through people who worked with Microsoft on their PC efforts for gaming and were part of the team on Dreamcast.

In the old days Xbox did similar things Sony did when they first got into the arena.
Sony courted Third party developers/Publishers by getting rid of dumb Nintendo Licensing clauses for Specific Cartridges that only Nintendo approved. Going disc and not making it some defined standard that only Sony owned was not in the cards.

And because of their relationship with music industry helped bring sound to consoles in a better way, along with using their global publishing for music/tv/film to help foreign countries get their games to more markets.
Xbox back when Shamus Blackly/ J allard were part of the picture courted PC developers. Helped with Direct x 9 development for studios/publishers. Helped with their online infrastructure for early online gaming.

A lot is owed to Microsoft/Xbox Studios in that time frame when they helped bring games to more markets via PC efforts. But there was nefarious things happening in the background with MS higher ups who slowly pulled control away from the gaming sector.
They would not let it run on its own, they had Micro control of budgets/Hardware, software deals. Instead of just supporting it and letting them make their decisions.

Thats why original people part of Direct x team all left who were original people on project. It's also why the edgy tone after 360 launch was all but gone, and literally was replaced by a more corp initiative. The original reason xbox exists was because of Bill gates hubris of wanting to own the living room and beating Japan.
He didn't care about games, or the medium. He cared about selling you Windows Living Room where you consumed your entertainment.

To me phill is more part of the Corp side than the original scrappy side that created XBox. He was never part of that he came into Enterprise side originally.

 

[Shmunter]

I 100% Disagree. When Xbox was started it was done by a scrappy team from Direct X people. It was started with courting PC/Graphics developers back in the old days of sioftware meet ups.

Sega had input on their controller through people who worked with Microsoft on their PC efforts for gaming and were part of the team on Dreamcast.

In the old days Xbox did similar things Sony did when they first got into the arena.
Sony courted Third party developers/Publishers by getting rid of dumb Nintendo Licensing clauses for Specific Cartridges that only Nintendo approved. Going disc and not making it some defined standard that only Sony owned was not in the cards.

And because of their relationship with music industry helped bring sound to consoles in a better way, along with using their global publishing for music/tv/film to help foreign countries get their games to more markets.
Xbox back when Shamus Blackly/ J allard were part of the picture courted PC developers. Helped with Direct x 9 development for studios/publishers. Helped with their online infrastructure for early online gaming.

A lot is owed to Microsoft/Xbox Studios in that time frame when they helped bring games to more markets via PC efforts. But there was nefarious things happening in the background with MS higher ups who slowly pulled control away from the gaming sector.
They would not let it run on its own, they had Micro control of budgets/Hardware, software deals. Instead of just supporting it and letting them make their decisions.

Thats why original people part of Direct x team all left who were original people on project. It's also why the edgy tone after 360 launch was all but gone, and literally was replaced by a more corp initiative. The original reason xbox exists was because of Bill gates hubris of wanting to own the living room and beating Japan.
He didn't care about games, or the medium. He cared about selling you Windows Living Room where you consumed your entertainment.

To me phill is more part of the Corp side than the original scrappy side that created XBox. He was never part of that he came into Enterprise side originally.

I agree. As a skunkworks passion project, the enthusiasm and craft came through. Due to its success it got corporatised mid way through the 360 Gen and it was over. Ms ruined Xbox

 

[Nhomnhom]

Clock is ticking for Xbox hardware and only Microsoft is to blame for that.

- Instead of shipping consoles to consumers when there was demand, they put the hardware into their cloud infrastructure. The few consoles that were available, were often tied to Xbox All Access plans and you could not buy the console outright - at least here in the EU

- Now the times are more difficult and Xbox raised the price when at the same time their much more succesful competitor cut the price. Now there's a 100 € price gap resulting in even less demand for Xbox hardware.

- MS completely **** the bed with their first party output, partnerships and marketing for at least a decade. There's almost no advertising and all of the big IPs are tied to PlayStation. Marvel, Star Wars, Fifa, Avatar etc.

It's not going to get better. I expect it to get much worse and I don't think Starfield or any acquisition of any multiplatform publisher is going to save the Xbox hardware division.

I'm still not convinced Starfield is going to be the success that everyone expects. I can already see the PR drama if the review scores are lower than expected.

MS shit the bed with first party output ever since Phil Spencer was put in charge of that more than 15 years ago.

The only generation where Xbox was a decent purchase what the 360 one and even then the PS3 was still a much better deal.

 

[riesgoyfortuna]

i havent seen that level of damage control since the last nazi leaders talked about how things werent that bad to their soldiers when the russians were on the streets on berlin

your hardware is going the way of the dodo motherfuckers and all the money of ms cant change that,the same way zune and a lot of initiatives were bombing,if people dont want your shit ,its game over sooner o later

 

[historia]

i havent seen that level of damage control since the last nazi leaders talked about how things werent that bad to their soldiers when the russians were on the streets on berlin

your hardware is going the way of the dodo motherfuckers and all the money of ms cant change that,the same way zune and a lot of initiatives were bombing,if people dont want your shit ,its game over sooner o later

I mean Nazi leaders at least a brain, I think these guys are just robots got updated with lastest script.

 

[Gods&Monsters]

Down 13% last quarter and down 11% for the year after the biggest year in gaming since forever



Phil: SOOONY!!!!

 

[Dabaus]

Down 13% last quarter and down 11% for the year after the biggest year in gaming since forever



Phil: SOOONY!!!!

I dont understand his chart, isnt the 211,915 bigger than 168,088. Whats that supposed to mean? And as i pointed out a few days ago, its strange how everything is down or stagnet and yet its "record revenue."

 

[Gods&Monsters]

I dont understand his chart, isnt the 211,915 bigger than 168,088. Whats that supposed to mean? And as i pointed out a few days ago, its strange how everything is down or stagnet and yet its "record revenue."

The 211 is for everything (windows, office), gaming only is 15.4 and was 16.2 last year. They keep adding new stuff like Bethesda and PC gamepass so it's hard to compare. It will be impossible to compare with Activision too.

They added PC gamepass to 40 new countries this year and it barely moved the needle.

PC Game Pass Expands To 40 More Countries Around The World

Xbox has announced that PC Game Pass is now available to 40 new countries around the world. This will come in the form of a preview program, so you need

gamermatters.com