Just stop Ozriel. I'm not in the mood for your illogical MS stanning. What doesn't make sense is your response.
An already subscribed user isn't "growth". "The consumers" I mention is referring to somebody not spending money to sign up to gamepass or buy some dlc or a game and them missing their growth target because they weren't as interested as MS thought they would be in their content or services.
What doesn't make sense is suggesting that they missed targets because they decided to give something for free as if they had targeted to charge for it before. Yet it's my post that doesn't make sense to you.
This is one of the major flaws with the subscription model in general. First, you get these amazing growth numbers as people sign up for your service, but once it plateaus, you're kind of screwed, and the only way you get more out of a person is by raising the price, which is what everyone is doing now like crazy (Netflix - $23 a month). And, you know, for the type of people who post here, who maybe bought 1-2 games a month, signing up for GP actually saves them money, which means it hurts MS.
This stuff isn't a secret, other people have talked about it, but it was all just masked by the incredible initial growth of these services early on. That said, MS is trying to do this thing by letting GP subscribers buy the game and play it a few days early, which is clever, and worked with Starfield, but the game needs to be massively massively hyped to work - it didnt seem to with FM. I assume that they are going to lean heavily on this model going forward. They might even juice it and give the games a longer "early access" period, although if they go too long then GP users will start rebelling because it's not the "day and date" thing.