Silent_Buddha
Legend
All purpose Sales and Sales Rumours and Anecdotes [2021 Edition]
- Thread starter BRiT
- Start date
BTW - Game Pass PC also includes EA Play.
Thank you, I forgot about that. It's fortunate it does, otherwise the value was looking a bit on the lower side.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
My tale might illustrate a couple things. There are 3 gamers in my family:
My younger son has GPU at full price. He likes it and over the last 12 months he has completed Ori, Ori 2, Halo CE, Edith Finch, Battletoads, and Hellblade . He also played a decent amount of GTA V and dabbled a bit with EA Sports games. He purchased the Assassin's Creed pack to supplement his gaming and mostly finished Origins so far. He plays about 6 hours per week.
Over the same time period, I used my son's GPU subscription to complete Ori 2, Halo CE, Battletoads, Hellblade, Gears Tactics, Call of the Sea, and The Medium. I also played a ton of Tetris, Forza Horizon 4, Wasteland 3, and Witcher 3. I got 60% of the way through Alan Wake before they yanked it and I'll likely buy it at some point. If I had to get my own subscription, I would. The only other game I'm tempted to buy right now is RE:Village. I play about 8 hours per week.
My older son only cares about the latest shooter his friends are playing. Call of Duty, PUBG, Fortnite, Battlefield ... rinse and repeat. Unless these are on GPU in the future or Halo Infinite is so good that he and his friends can't resist, he'll never get GPU. He plays about 15-20 hours per week.
So with the smallest sample size MS has 33%, can get 33%, and will likely not get 33% of the user base to subscribe. So they have 25 of 75 million active Xbox gamers and can get to 50 million without changing their strategy too much. [emoji3]
My younger son has GPU at full price. He likes it and over the last 12 months he has completed Ori, Ori 2, Halo CE, Edith Finch, Battletoads, and Hellblade . He also played a decent amount of GTA V and dabbled a bit with EA Sports games. He purchased the Assassin's Creed pack to supplement his gaming and mostly finished Origins so far. He plays about 6 hours per week.
Over the same time period, I used my son's GPU subscription to complete Ori 2, Halo CE, Battletoads, Hellblade, Gears Tactics, Call of the Sea, and The Medium. I also played a ton of Tetris, Forza Horizon 4, Wasteland 3, and Witcher 3. I got 60% of the way through Alan Wake before they yanked it and I'll likely buy it at some point. If I had to get my own subscription, I would. The only other game I'm tempted to buy right now is RE:Village. I play about 8 hours per week.
My older son only cares about the latest shooter his friends are playing. Call of Duty, PUBG, Fortnite, Battlefield ... rinse and repeat. Unless these are on GPU in the future or Halo Infinite is so good that he and his friends can't resist, he'll never get GPU. He plays about 15-20 hours per week.
So with the smallest sample size MS has 33%, can get 33%, and will likely not get 33% of the user base to subscribe. So they have 25 of 75 million active Xbox gamers and can get to 50 million without changing their strategy too much. [emoji3]
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Deleted member 11852
Guest
No slight intended but this is part and parcel of the profitability discussion. Most people won't pay more than they need to for anything (which is smart) but it raises the question of how many Game Pass subscribers there would be if everybody had to pay $14.99 a month.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
And that's a very important question as well, and one that MS knows they have to address at some point.
However, as the service is still in its growth phase and it's a subscription based service, growing the service is more important than profitability.
Hence, while MS tinkers with the service (number of games added per week, how often titles leave the service, how to determine which titles leave the service, optimal duration for a title to be on the service, options for keeping a title on the service beyond that timeframe, etc.) they simultaneously need to keep growing the service. This was especially important when there weren't many titles on the service, the service wasn't complete, the front end client was ass, many things were in flux, etc.
Now it's mostly stabilized, but there's likely some X subscriber number that want before switching off some of the free or hugely discounted methods of entering Gamepass.
However, saying that, I'm not sure as many will go away as we might think.
- Bing rewards has synergies as it drives not only subscribers to GP, but also boosts user engagement with Bing which drives advertising (both web based and Bing rewards based) as well as driving business to other departments of MS (like the MS Store, Office, Azure, etc.).
- This is something they've been doing for years, so they likely know the exact breakdown of how much benefit they derive for both GP and Bing and how Bing drives profitability in other areas
- You've been able to redeem Bing points for XBox Live Gold for years now as well as buy Xbox games and consoles with Bing reward points, so using it for GP is a natural extension.
- So this one likely would stay.
- 1 USD for 3 months. I could see this being either reduced to 1 month, or only used for timed promotions at some point.
- Alternatively, changed to be included as a free 3 months with a new console purchase.
- Rolling XBox Live Gold subscription months into GP subscription months.
- If MS are really planning on getting rid of XBox Live Gold, then this becomes a non-factor whenever that happens.
- Discounted subscription redemption cards at retail outlets.
- This has existed for years with XBox Live Gold, so I don't see this changing. Not much MS can do if a retailer wants to discount the cards they sell.
Regards,
SB
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...t-evil-village-dominate-may-uk-monthly-charts
Resident Evil Platform Split
PlayStation 58%
XBOX 31%
PC 11%
Resident Evil Platform Split
PlayStation 58%
XBOX 31%
PC 11%
D
Deleted member 86764
Guest
Those are some scary figures (wonderful for Sony).
PS5 singlehandedly sold more copies of Resident Evil than all of the Xboxes (One S, One X, Series S, Series X) and PC combined.
*gulp*
As much as I'm enjoying my PS5, I'd prefer a single company not to dominate so significantly.
PS5 singlehandedly sold more copies of Resident Evil than all of the Xboxes (One S, One X, Series S, Series X) and PC combined.
*gulp*
As much as I'm enjoying my PS5, I'd prefer a single company not to dominate so significantly.
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Deleted member 11852
Guest
And the UK is generally seen as a fairly balanced PlayStation/Xbox market. Whilst it has generally tipped the nod to PlayStation, it is more balanced than many neighbouring European countries.
This may just be a sign that Sony are getting more PS5s into the UK than Microsoft are getting Xbox Series consoles in.
WRT lower than expected xbox software, this is just further evidence that Gamepass is harming xbox software sales
* Though that nearly 3:1 PS5 vs PS4 shows even this early on and with the limited supply dropping support for PS4 is not gonna be that important in future
Some sales tidbits in the lastest Xbox news release...
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/06/10/whats-next-for-gaming-highlights/
Tommy McClain
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/06/10/whats-next-for-gaming-highlights/
Tommy McClain
I think people assume that due to Game Pass all these sales are lost.
But GP represents 20% of the Xbox population. So this is not likely to be the norm. The reality is that attach rates are so low, many companies are getting much more people trying their product, engagement is likely significantly increased from the influx of new players. Sales conversions likely happen further down the line, or on the next title.
If we take a look at Resident Evil Village; it had it's greatest units shipped, 4M across all platforms. 45% of that was on PC and Xbox. Meaning they scored about < 2M on non PS platform. Game Pass would have sucked up some of those sales surely, but it would also increase the player count significantly more than 2M players.
Do I have to keep repeating this every time that ppl bring up this quote?
This doesnt prove at all that ppl are buying more games, in fact those numbers are pretty sad, faced with a smogasbord of choices why are this hardcore gamer group only playing 30% more genres and 40% more games!!!!!!
WTF I would of guessed at least double but maybe even 3-4x
I can't talk since Im not a gamer (I've only played maybe 5% of my steam library) but if I was back like I was when a teenager, I'ld be like a kid in a candy store, over indulging myself. So why is this not happening with gamepass? Are the titles low quality (Ive looked some seem to pretty decent)
time is the equalizer for all things.
the most common mistakes in most discussions are the assumptions that
a) time is infinite
b) money is infinite
Because there are real constraints on both time and money, that also means there are constraints on how much you can play, what you want to play, and at what price points you want to play them at.
The latter being a big deal. Price matters and as price increases the investment is larger for a game you may not potentially want to play.
If you consider the size of the platform, say even call of duty, as big as it is, they only sell 25M units. There are over 120M+ consoles, and 100M+ PCs.
COD is easily top 5 franchises of all time in sales as well. Penetration rate is still relatively low.
So when you consider this, think about all these other titles that _never_ ever get played. Because every single device, movie service, tv services, sports service, social media service, every mobile device are all fighting for your time, or in this case, screen time. You can only spend so much time browsing the web, being on social media, being on netflix and consuming game pass, etc etc.
Because of real life time limitations most people _will not_ buy every single game there is. Attachment rates are super low for the majority of the population, but a sub service which is relatively cheap will grant them access to a wide category of games to play here and there. The number of sales lost to game pass will likely be not be as large as you think it will be because, if you really look at it, sales are relatively low anyway.
Game pass is a significantly good way for a studio to hedge their losses here in the form of receiving monetary gain back but also increasing the amount of engagement and reach. You can look at Game Pass as Put Option if you want, where you invested so much into buying a stock when it's low, and when it doesn't hit the desired targets, you hedged your losses by still extracting additional value out of it via game pass. In the exact same method, players are hedging their losses by subscribing to game pass. They don't need to play every game, but the cost of game pass is about the cost of 2-3 new titles per year. So you are hedging your money here that you can find an equivalent amount of satisfaction from game pass as you could buying 2-3 new titles per year with significantly less risk you bought a dud.
Sometimes you will lose, but likely most times you will win. If Game Pass was not successful, there wouldn't be a second arrival of GTAV on GP, or RDR2 for instance. These franchises want to continually find new players because their online system is netting them $$$ through micro transactions, and GP is the key driver to getting even more players into it.
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