Krisprolls
Banned
You should calm down a bit... MS isn't successful in the video game industry in the way you think they are. First, they tried to compete with Sony for years and basically they failed : in terms of revenue, Xbox wasn't making nearly enough money for MS to be considered as a relevant business compared to their big cash cows Azure and Office. In terms of brand recognition, Xbox is still a dwarf compared to Playstation. Nobody cares about Xbox outside of the US, they're irrelevant. And competing with Sony with studios in the console market doesn't make sense anymore, Sony has far too many AAA studios right now. They're way too far ahead, it's dead.
So MS had 2 options : giving up altogether on gaming OR trying a new strategy. They chose the latter, but multiple articles showed they were pretty close to give up before they went the Gamepass way. Gaming as a business makes no sense for MS unless they can rack a huge number of consumers and make big money. Shareholders want a big return on this business because MS already makes a huge return on their other businesses like Azure or Office.
Will this new model work ? Nobody knows, because we're in phase 1, where everything is given for free to get as much subscribers as possible, while losing money obviously. Unless you think hundreds of games are worth less than a few dollars a month.
There's an illusion going on here that MS will come and put multiple high quality AAA games day 1 exclusively on gamepass, and that won't happen, simply because it would be too expensive to do so. That's why gamepass will be a cheaper option with great value for people who don't have the money to buy the higher budget $70 games. In that way, I agree with them, they don't compete with Sony, they're more of a publisher selling subscriptions right now. But when / if AAA games come to Gamepass, they will be few and far between and they'll be available elsewhere too, because otherwise it's impossible to make up for the money their studios cost.
And the Gamepass you see here, that's not what you'll get later anyway, either quality will go down, or price will go up, that's what every subscription based provider did, and it won't be different here. It has to make money for them at some point, and unless you think daily costs of dozens of studios like Bethesda are zero, they definitely don't make money right now.
Ultimately, will this model work ? It's possible, as a cheaper option for casual or money constrained gamers, but not as a replacement for higher budget games like Sony does. As I already said multiple times, the problem with this is we're TIME constrained in this hobby, more than MONEY constrained. It's mostly cheap to buy the 4 or 5 best games every year, and play them when you want, so why would you settle with playing inferior or cheaper games instead ? When I want to play the latest blockbuster, I don't want to play anything else instead. And I can, because it doesn't cost too much. I want to play them when I want too, not watching every day it isn't removed from my subscription. That's why I don't believe that much in subscription models in gaming.
My personal take is I doubt it'll work. The problem is people like us want the best games, the blockbusters. They don't really care about paying less and getting tons of "other" games. It's not about quantity, because we lack time for that, it's about quality. People have thousands of great games basically free on their PC, and Sony AAA games still sells more and more million copies, it tells you all you need to know about the way games are bought. If money and quantity were what mattered in video games, we'd already see it now, and we see the opposite, highly priced great games selling more and more million copies.
And mobile users just want simple cheap Angry Birds like games, which Gamepass doesn't give you either. So they're trying to sell the intermediate car right here, and today, only cheapest cars OR premium cars are still selling. Intermediate cars makers died. Xbox Gamepass is between a rock and a hard place.
And buying Bethesda for $7.5 billion is like going all in on Gamepass for MS. The problem with that is if subscription numbers don't take off, studios will soon cost too much in daily costs. What's the chance a big exec looks at all that in a few years and says : "we"re just not making enough money with all that" ? That's pretty high, I'd say. At that point, it's pretty certain they'd give up on gaming. MS has a long history of abandoning branches and products in the blink of an eye, like Google does too. Look no further than Mixer recently, after paying huge sums to Ninja they just pulled the plug.
Buying Bethesda is a huge bet and I don't see how they can make it work. Bethesda was a bit on the down slope, another Elder Scrolls won't come before 5 years or more... How will they pay for the studio costs AND make Gamepass profitable ? Selling games outside Gamepass will basically be mandatory, unless you're ok with bleeding money... But if you sell the best games you have (which already are few and far between) to the competition, which incentive do I have to subscribe ?
The jury's out, but I don't see it working on the long run. Their best bet was attacking Sony with studios and AAA games in the Xbox 360 era, beating them in their own game when they were down. Nowadays ? I don't see any way for MS, the video game market is mature and Sony secured it. They have too many studios, too many blockbusters... Look at the Game Awards, now there are basically a majority of Sony games, they're getting more and more GotY awards, as 3rd party devs like Ubi or EA are either weakening or not releasing anything anymore like Valve or Rockstar. The gap between Sony studios games and competition is increasing every year, not shrinking... Core gamers won't say : "okay, but no, I won't play the best games, I'll subscribe to Gamepass instead" I just don't see it.
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