Ampere: Xbox #1 platform for EX33 and Oblivion

Dont Be Late Lets Go GIF by The Democrats
 
35% of Expedition 33 players also played Oblivion, according to the data firm. This is primarily due to the Xbox edition, with 55% of Xbox Expedition 33 players also engaging with Oblivion. Both games were available within the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

What a time to be alive, two fantastic RPG's releasing within days of each other. And both on GP.

Gamers are truly eating good.
 
idk how not putting arguably 2-3 of this years biggest AAA games, and adding games that are getting critical acclaim (ie: Expedition 33) on your service/platform on day 1 isnt getting more people into the service. As far as consumer friendly, this service far does more good to both the devs and the userbase alike than any other service out there imo.

If console tribality is the reason gamepass dies, well expect the industry to get just swarmed with these constant AAA-AAAA games that will be more and more mediocre and more pushes into shittier live service models again.
For me personally the issue is that MS backend on PC is terrible. There are stability issues, patch issues, problems with space reclamation, issues with modding, performance and more.

It's just not worth it beyond occasionally using it as a "demo" through buying a cheap GamePass month. And on XSX I mainly play BC stuff and occasional games I get a big discount.
 
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What a time to be alive, two fantastic RPG's releasing within days of each other. And both on GP.

Gamers are truly eating good.

Honestly we've been eating for like the last three years. Gaming has been insane lately. I remember during the 360/ps4 days having to wait for something to come out to play. Now I'm having to just outright not even put something on my list because there's no chance I get to it.
 
For me personally the issue is that MS backend on PC is terrible. There are stability issues, patch issues, problems with space reclamation, issues with modding, performance and more.

It's just not worth it beyond occasionally using it as a "demo" but buying a cheap GamePass month. And on XSX I mainly play BC stuff and occasional games I get a big discount.

Agreed. They should scrap the whole thing and just use BNet. It's barebones and ancient but it's at least perfectly functional. It's actually shocking how terrible their Xbox app is, and this is from the people who make the fucking OS.
 
It's on game pass to just download and play, why wouldn't it be no 1, it's not sales though and i wonder how many new subscribers signed up for a 20 year old remaster now matter how good the remaster is, and if PC gamers want to use mods they wont use PC game pass they will use Steam.
 
Gamepass player = 1 youtube view, purchaser = 1 $49.99 purchase, we are not the same. Claiming gamepass downloads as equivalent to sales is peak delusion. The #1 platform for Expedition 33 is Playstation 5.

Where exactly did I say a GP download is equivalent to a sale?

Any positive news about GP seems to send some of you into a frenzy
 
It would be interesting to see more relevant metrics. Revenue per platform and hours played per platform.
Oddly enough the quotes in the OP stop two paragraphs short of your answer:

According to Ampere, and tracking players worldwide, the average playtime for Expedition 33 on Xbox was 2.2 hours, while it was 4.4 hours on PlayStation and Steam. Meanwhile for Oblivion, average play time was 3.6 hours on Steam, 3.8 hours on PlayStation and 2.2 hours again on Xbox.
 
I remember the days when people said Xbox gamers didn't have good taste and they wouldn't play JRPG style games, now here we are.
 
Oddly enough the quotes in the OP stop two paragraphs short of your answer:

According to Ampere, and tracking players worldwide, the average playtime for Expedition 33 on Xbox was 2.2 hours, while it was 4.4 hours on PlayStation and Steam. Meanwhile for Oblivion, average play time was 3.6 hours on Steam, 3.8 hours on PlayStation and 2.2 hours again on Xbox.

Hold on.........I'm noticing a pattern here. :unsure:
 
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Oddly enough the quotes in the OP stop two paragraphs short of your answer:

According to Ampere, and tracking players worldwide, the average playtime for Expedition 33 on Xbox was 2.2 hours, while it was 4.4 hours on PlayStation and Steam. Meanwhile for Oblivion, average play time was 3.6 hours on Steam, 3.8 hours on PlayStation and 2.2 hours again on Xbox.
No surprise here.

I don't even want to imagine the sales split.
 
I remember the days when people said Xbox gamers didn't have good taste and they wouldn't play JRPG style games, now here we are.

To be clear that's not what this data shows. Do you know how many games I booted up on GP and never even played past 30 mins? Way more than the amount of games I actually played and finished.
 
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this shows MS's wet dream (viral marketing) in action; doing they heavy lifting to spread the word. (of course the games need to capture the zeitgeist in the first place).

So, no more excuses and spin. GP will not create a bubble of success for a game; a truly successful game will reach people by its own merits.
 
Isn't Expedition 33 sold out of physical copies almost everywhere?
Yep. Sandfall even posted it on their X.

So it means they sold aprox. 1m copies on ps5/pc while 800k played it on game pass. That's actually good, they're selling copies and making money with ps5/pc while they got the game pass microsoft dough & help for promoting the game etc... Good for them
 
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How do you come to that conclusion?

Isn't it more logical to think that if you have an Xbox then you likely have Gamepass as well? If gamepass wasnt a thing then obviously they'd buy them.

What's with everyones need to constantly shit on something even when it's pretty decent news?

Exactly.
 
Obviously. However many millions of people with GamePass Ultimate wouldn't buy the game. They have it as long as they subscribe.
 
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The hit RPG, developed by French studio Sandfall Interactive, sold over one million units in three days
What are the splits per platform?
Xbox was the No.1 platform for both games because of that Game Pass inclusion. 45% of Expedition 33 players were on Xbox, while 47% of Oblivion players were on Microsoft's platform.
Makes sense because:
Both Oblivion and Expedition 33 were not available in a subscription service on Steam or PlayStation.
I love a good spin on data. But it's foolish to think people won't notice it.
 
Those GP numbers include people who played for 5 minutes. I bet a bunch of GP kids play everything on there for 5 to 10 minutes. Most of those people would never have purchased a game like this and didn't really play it here either.
 
Ah, yes, Ampere, an epitome of this gif.

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We believe any report without any direct access to data or methodology now, and while we're at it let's ignore the sales data.
 
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Eh.....bigger news to me is that the game seems to have been a massive success. 120k+ peak on Steam which is the minority group for the game. Would have been higher had it not been for Game Pass obviously. Bulk of the revenue for the game is coming from PlayStation. Something tells me future Sandfall games won't start out on subscription services. They probably got a sweet deal from Microsoft to help fund their development, but ultimately I'm thinking they left a lot of sales revenue on the table.
 
Errr, how about, no.

Conflating players and buyers is plain bullshit because the buy-in spend and therefore actual level of interest is wildly different.
I've edited my reply because I think it probably came off as too sarcastic and rude and I think that's not a good way to be, but let's take a step back and see if the guys making a living doing commentary on the state of the games industry, are covering the launch of this game and who also got an interview with the publisher are the ones that are getting it wrong, or if it's the people who are triggered by any metric by which one video game brand does well. Who is the most reliable witness? The publisher praising the platform? The guys serving the industry, or the guy unhealthily attached to shitting on a video game brand.
 
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Ffs. It's gone from ... " do people play these games on xbox..no one plays xbox"

To

" ok, xbox and gamepass has the numbers but who's playing more"

You're getting into some real psychology here.
 
'Who's playing more' just confirms what common sense tells us already: that 'players' on game pass are not (in a commercial sense) the equivalent of 'players' elsewhere who had to pay for the game to play it.

The statement in the article about Oblivion actually helping Exp33 because it made people think about RPGs that week is pretty funny. Ok bro.
 
If you know it all so well, why don't you go start your own games industry business analysis platform, record an interview with the publisher and then publish your measured response to the available data and commentary provided by the game's publisher.

You'll surely own the sector and make your fortune. I for one will cheer you along every step of the way.

You can do it!

I spent well over 20 years working in the industry, but I've frankly little desire to go back in any capacity, thanks.

You don't need a MBA to understand that when "players" is used as a metric its essentially about engagement. Sales on the other hand is much more about revenue.

Obviously either without further context is meaningless; engagement matters most when there are ads being served, and revenue is generated primarily based on impressions, and when it comes to sales the revenue per unit is obviously the key.

So when you see articles like this, which freely conflates the two without further context, its pointedly obvious that its serving a marketing, not analytical purpose.

The bottom line is real simple: If a product isn't ad-supported or the basis of further monetization (e.g GaaS), then the only real metric of success is revenue generated by units sold. Anything else is just obfuscating bullshit used to create a certain impression. i.e. marketing.

In the context of GamePass its actually quite difficult to get any sort of real conclusive read. The number of downloads/plays shows interest, yes. BUT, that number is largely governed by the subscriber base size for the reporting window, which is an independent variable based on what that number was prior (e.g. general health of the service) and cannot easily be used to isolate benefit in terms of retention/new subs without first filtering to exclude other titles on the service concurrently that may be masking its effect. e.g. Oblivion remaster.

The only thing that can be obviously said is that if MS had high hopes for Ex 33 to give them serious uplift on GP subs/retention they wouldn't have released Oblivion at the same time - given that Bethesda's game targets a comparable demographic and their simultaneous appearance dilutes the revenue impact for both - individually as products and as together as service drivers.

In short, this is not indicative of MS' finally getting their shit together in regards of their publishing pipeline, its just more evidence of wastefulness and poor portfolio management.

That's my analysis. Enjoy.
 
I spent well over 20 years working in the industry, but I've frankly little desire to go back in any capacity, thanks.

You don't need a MBA to understand that when "players" is used as a metric its essentially about engagement. Sales on the other hand is much more about revenue.

Obviously either without further context is meaningless; engagement matters most when there are ads being served, and revenue is generated primarily based on impressions, and when it comes to sales the revenue per unit is obviously the key.

So when you see articles like this, which freely conflates the two without further context, its pointedly obvious that its serving a marketing, not analytical purpose.

The bottom line is real simple: If a product isn't ad-supported or the basis of further monetization (e.g GaaS), then the only real metric of success is revenue generated by units sold. Anything else is just obfuscating bullshit used to create a certain impression. i.e. marketing.

In the context of GamePass its actually quite difficult to get any sort of real conclusive read. The number of downloads/plays shows interest, yes. BUT, that number is largely governed by the subscriber base size for the reporting window, which is an independent variable based on what that number was prior (e.g. general health of the service) and cannot easily be used to isolate benefit in terms of retention/new subs without first filtering to exclude other titles on the service concurrently that may be masking its effect. e.g. Oblivion remaster.

The only thing that can be obviously said is that if MS had high hopes for Ex 33 to give them serious uplift on GP subs/retention they wouldn't have released Oblivion at the same time - given that Bethesda's game targets a comparable demographic and their simultaneous appearance dilutes the revenue impact for both - individually as products and as together as service drivers.

In short, this is not indicative of MS' finally getting their shit together in regards of their publishing pipeline, its just more evidence of wastefulness and poor portfolio management.

That's my analysis. Enjoy.
You ought to post like that more often, very interesting, thanks!
 
'Who's playing more' just confirms what common sense tells us already: that 'players' on game pass are not (in a commercial sense) the equivalent of 'players' elsewhere who had to pay for the game to play it.

The statement in the article about Oblivion actually helping Exp33 because it made people think about RPGs that week is pretty funny. Ok bro.

Some of this definitely makes sense. Someone on a rental service is going to digest media differently to someone who has purchased an item and feels they want to get their moneys worth. Its simple psychology, almost an extension of buyers justification. Also, theres plenty more factors but all interesting if you want to analyse data.
 
Oddly enough the quotes in the OP stop two paragraphs short of your answer:

According to Ampere, and tracking players worldwide, the average playtime for Expedition 33 on Xbox was 2.2 hours, while it was 4.4 hours on PlayStation and Steam. Meanwhile for Oblivion, average play time was 3.6 hours on Steam, 3.8 hours on PlayStation and 2.2 hours again on Xbox.
I hope the developers have a contract with MS for total players and not time played then, they deserve to be paid.
 
It's normal that Xbox is the platform where most people have tried those games for a while because of the GP... but then when it comes to playing them and putting in the hours, PS5 and Steam rule.
 
#1 my ass.

Show me the sales breakdown.

I don't care how many kids there are that download every game on GP to play for 5 minutes before going back to Roblox.
 
I'm sure the devs are counting that Xbox 💰.

kes GIF

Of course they are, they get a huge amount of money to guarantee the studios success and survival wether the game bombs or lands well.

It's weird we're now comparing hours played on Gamepass now its proving to be the number 1 place players are playing, that's the entire point of Gamepass to try new games that you never typically would and if you don't like them after a couple hours no harm done.

So yes play time will always be down on average compared to someone paying $80 for a title and now they have to get their monies worth compared to someone who pays $20 a month for gamepass and may typically never play RPGs.
 
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