I disagree.
We see in music that multiple streaming services can thrive without much issue. I think the problem industry is movie/tv streaming. Content is extremely expensive with an episode of tv (30minutes) costing millions of dollars to create. and weeks of work. Movies take 3-5 months of filming and cost tens if not millions of dollars to create for roughly 90-120minutes of content. When you look at video games you get a lot more hours per $ used to create the content. Some games can have very small budgets but players could sink hundreds of hours into it.
As for MS , they are much more than game pass, that is just one way to drive growth. They will continue with consoles and are in the process of purchasing a huge gaming company to bolster their offerings and market postion
That's somewhat fair, but is thriving the right word? Spotify's the biggest platform, yet it's
still not profitable. Factor in that artists receive a pittance, and I think it paints a pretty bleak picture: the art which is cheapest to produce is still too expensive for the worlds largest music streaming service at a price the public is willing to pay, and underpaying artists is still not enough to fix the issue.
As for more hours per $ used to create the content, that's certainly true, but when Gamepass is clearly hungry for a breadth of content, the fact that you can dig down into most individual games becomes irrelevant. If people are going to be nibbling at the service a la carte, the 400 hour feast of individual titles just becomes wasteful when gamers will imbibe a handful of hours before moving on.
And as we hear from the subscribers of any streaming service, whatever medium: a lack of extreme variety renders it some derivation of "bad." Couple that with today's rampant, societal ADHD, and I think you've really got a very difficult problem on your hands. Of course, customers don't really know what they want and you should basically never ask them, but that's a whole different debate
They need to spend huge sums of money to attract a variety of content in order to attract a large base of subscribers, just like all media streaming services. And the fact that we hear time and again about their spectacular revenue and abysmal profitability just doesn't strike me as promising.
I'd honestly love them to crack it, because I think a huge amount of games are massively bloated and unfocussed, and the problem only seems to keep getting worse. Gamepass could well be key to seeing more games of the length and simple charm of, for example, Far Lone Sails.
And lastly, I'm not saying that MS are only Gamepass, but rather the they are leaning into it maybe a bit too heavily when streaming services as a whole seem to be a bit of a damp squib in terms of profitability. Their OS features have knocked it out of the park from the X360 onwards. They have all of the talent, resources, and IP to regularly produce great content. But they somehow manage to keep shitting the bed.
Remember how there was talk of trying to get Gamepass onto PlayStation and Nintendo consoles? That's the kind of thing I refer to when I say their focus is too greatly on Gamepass and dominating with it. I think they'd be better served making XBox/Windows the sole home of Gamepass, continuing their day one releases, but releasing some first party games for sale on other platforms - they get direct sales from other platforms, but also get to advertise "hey come to XBox to get this cheaper" which increases the install base, which increases the number of people buying 3rd party games on their platform.
