Well of course not. These game studios were selling games at 60-80$ each. Microsoft bought them, then started providing the all the games for a flat fee of 15$ per month.
I assumed their strategy was to lose money in the medium term while they worked on getting people used to playing games on subscription. Where they make their money back is when they stop outright selling games at full price and make them only available on subscription, and then they slowly start increasing that monthly subscription cost.
In order for that to work they need a large library and like 5-10 years.
Turns out corporations can manage long term planning when the plan reduces quality of life for customers. Crazy!
It’s $9 for the standard Game Pass, and was $1 a month until they stopped that last year sometime.
Yeah, they needed a shitload of money to pay Bobby Kotick apparently.
As a gamer who has owned every Xbox from the OG to a Xbox One S, I just don’t understand Microsoft’s strategy for this generation. Vanishingly few console exclusives, and most of those shipped on PC, too. As someone with a decent PC and enough income to buy 2-3 consoles per gen, they just haven’t given me a reason to buy an Xbox Series console.
I know they hoped to sell Game Pass to PC only players, but without the lock-in of a console, there’s just no incentive to buy it over a PS Plus subscription and individually buying the exclusives I want on PC.
Now they’re burning bridges with players by closing down beloved developers, even if their last title was successful. I wonder what Ninja Theory devs are thinking with Hellblade 2 a couple weeks out.
I bet they’re currently shitting bricks
Game Pass and X Cloud is their strategy.
But it turns out that there’s not a whole lot of reason to get Game Pass if the games suck, and if you want to play a game long term, you’re better off buying it once on Steam instead of paying a subscription.
And X Cloud still sucks ass.
They have no decent exclusives, and their purchase of Bethesda didn’t pay off because Redfall and Starfield sucked ass.
They wasted billions on Activision Blizzard, which it seems like was entirely for the WoW and CoD IPs, and now they’re shutting other studios they scooped up with Bethesda which was purchased for the Fallout and Elder Scrolls IP.
They’re trying to score exclusive IPs for the next gen to get people stuck in their ecosystem.
Xbox President Matt Booty
Matt Booty
Booty
Lol
I wonder if regulators will bring this up the next time Microsoft wants to buy another publisher. They fought tooth-and-nail to buy Activision Blizzard and like a child that got a new toy they’re throwing out the old ones.
It’s secretly benefiting the smaller game studios because Microsoft is basically giving up marketshare. The real question is whether MS wants to buy any more studios.
Benefits how? I feel like gaming is going to become like the startup sector where companies create something to specifically get acquired by a big company.
Like it’s becoming so prevalent for these big gaming publishers to vacuum up IP and sit on it, it’s just the Disney-fication of gaming.
With all the money they’ll save from shutting down all the smaller studios they can just go out and buy more.