Of course all data has a skew, the difference here (and using your example) is that some of the bullets have been tampered with.
The lack of clarity over the data means we don’t really understand (and likely never will). But here’s another example, I have had an account forever, going back to OXB. I hardly ever bought games, but recently I have been more affluent and had more game time, I got GP and bought a couple games. This will show as GP somehow magically making me play and buy more games when in fact it was just because I had more time and money. And that questions how much lockdown will skew figures even further from the reality.
I talked about people buying within the service (previously to the bit I just mentioned), but that was how Netflix got brought into the conversation. I said people might get a free trial or open a new account just to get a discount on a game. Hence I said Netflix couldn’t be compared because you wouldn’t trial Netflix to buy a film.
Once again, as someone who works in the industry those factors, while are there, or essentially non factors on a line of regression. There are much harder data points to solve than this, in particular the data is much more complete than other industries.
If you are working for Google say as a Data Lead; their job is to prove how much a company spends on AdWords will directly correlate to sales.
It doesn’t matter if they see an ad and buy it online. Or in stores etc. They just need to show the conversion formula. Ie, for every 1M you spend on advertising with google you will get back 1.4M in revenue. That’s their full time job and each data lead has a specific vertical they cover with each team.
and you can think of every reason under the sun why you might see an ad or never click on an ad. But as long as that conversion ratio is right, the spend will equate to revenue.
That job is much harder to do than to prove GamePass increases spending. There are so many incomplete data points on google, where Xbox has all your stats on game time, play times, accounts, what you’re looking at, what your friends are doing, etc.
if you are upset about MS data points, then you should be just as angry about the idea of ad words conversions. Because the click through rate is less than 0.01%. And no one you know clicks on ads. No one.
and yet the google continues to make huge profits from it. Through google, through YouTube, etc.
It is a large industry and it's not exactly straight forward. But to understand how digital advertising makes money (and gamepass is sort of fits into similar metrics on that) you should look at understanding just the most basic form which is Google Adwords campaigns.
Even basic calculators here:
https://rothmanppc.com/profit/
for instance can provide a ballpark of where to expect your profits to land despite not calculating for so many millions of iterations of things that can occur. The data lead job is for larger jobs like advertising for Ford or Mazda, but even at a micro scale, you can start somewhere to get an idea of how much spend is required to obtain a profit. With gamepass you might work with another set of numbers such as; hours played, number of friends, etc. number of players that need to play to get a single purchase/dlc etc. What the average spend is from a gamepass spender if they do buy etc.
It's not nearly as inaccurate as you say, and MS can provide some basic calculations to showcase that gamepass is increasing spend with certain companies, and if that is happening, those companies are likely to stick around and continue to use that service.
I don't assume that most people pay attention to how digital marketing has changed the game. But the level that we go to, to exploit your own information and use it back against you for hyper consumerism is immense. You think the only reason you bought more games is because you have more money to spend now, or some other reason. That's certainly a much more welcoming thought to believe than to know we are data mining your browser, your apps, your microphone, all your social media, your geo locations, you Alex/Google home units, your text etc and finding the exact things you would buy. At one point in time, my job (as part of a very large team) was to come up with a solution to tell the government how many residents were breaking quarantine during the height of COVID, which areas you would go, and which areas we would shut down as a result to stop people from doing that.
There are whole companies that are dedicated to using this data for the
purpose of election purchasing. With respect, gamepass spending is trivial.
There are full books and studies on this that should be read by anyone in digital marketing:
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-moments/zero-moment-truth/
quick summary; Whether we're shopping for corn flakes, concert tickets or a honeymoon in Paris, the Internet has changed how we decide what to buy. At Google, we call this online decision-making moment the Zero Moment of Truth, or simply, ZMOT.
The ZMOT refers to the moment in the buying process when the consumer researches a product prior to purchase.
Emphasis mine; as gamepass is a basically the best consumer researching service for testing games before purchase.
, which for me feels super low - I think I have a 120+ PS4 games and maybe 30-40+ on Switch. 
