2w ago

Microsoft reportedly estimated that Game Pass led to $300 million in lost sales of Black Ops 6, with 82% of copies sold being on the Game Pass-less PlayStation 5

www.pcgamer.com

Technology @piefed.social

Sunshine (she/her) @piefed.social

2w ago

Microsoft reportedly estimated that Game Pass led to $300 million in lost sales of Black Ops 6, with 82% of copies sold being on the Game Pass-less PlayStation 5

www.pcgamer.com /gaming-industry/microsoft-reportedly-estimated-that-game-pass-led-to-usd300-million-in-lost-sales-of-black-ops-6-with-82-percent-of-copies-sold-being-on-the-game-pass-less-playstation-5/

38 comments

Of course it would. Why would I pay 100 bucks for a game that consistently got worse over time past it's first few months and becomes dead in a year when the new game comes out? If it wasn't on game pass, I wouldn't even have bothered.
This is some creative math. So the $20 a month people were then paying for GamePass didn’t amount for anything?
This is why the ex Bethesda guy said GamePass hurts developers. They’re making a killing on GamePass but they aren’t applying those numbers to game sales. Games on GamePass are expected to sell well outside of GamePass, so GamePass literally hurts games on the service. So who wins? Looks like just Microsoft.
- It’s unclear if MS is even winning considering they’re trying to hike the price 50%, and considering that Xbox sales are flat.
- Except they don't win because their poor performance analysis leads them to close the studios that make gamepass worth subscribing to...
Damn, that's the same bass-ackwards logic that record companies use to say piracy makes them lose money.
Spoiler alert: the majority of people pirating your stuff would not have otherwise purchased it. You have lost nothing.
Similarly, the majority of people using gamepass to play the game would absolutely not have bought the game, especially since it's the same game as last time, with new names and skins.
For instance: the last call of duty game I bought was MW3. I only played black ops 2 when someone got two copies for their birthday and gave one to me I only remember playing for the zombies. I have played a total of less than 30 minutes, from startup screen to shutdown, of all the call of duties since then. Absolutely no chance in hell I'd buy another one. But I'm sure Microsoft would have included me trying it out as a potential lost sale of every one of them.
- I think for a series established that well, they should have a good estimate of how many people would have bought the game. Especially with the PlayStation crowd as a control group. Though there are probably more PS5s out there than Xbox Series devices. So in this case I do think that yes, a lot more people would have bought it.
  If your argument was fully correct, there wouldn't have been many games sold on PlayStation either.
  They would probably have loved to lower those 84% for PlayStation sales using the logic if it was justifiable. But no matter what, you'll always have to admit a mistake: either that GamePass hurts sales, that the market share of Xbox Series is small compared to the PlayStation or that your number one IP that you acquired for a lot of money and banked on no longer draws a crowd. Neither of these options looks good.
- I really don't understand why people like those games. I don't find them fun at all. And the micro transactions are so fucking obnoxious.
  
  They're a very pure and straightforward shooter experience with a lot of polish. I don't think it's that weird.
  The level of monetization is totally unhinged at this point, but there's a good game buried underneath it all.
  
  I used to play black ops 1 a shitload. I was fresh out of highschool and it was my first online game after getting internet. I already liked FPS games and this was interactive FPS with actual skilled people instead of shitty bullet sponge bots.
  As for why people love them so much now? I have no idea. I'm sure I also wouldn't have cared for them if I had played online games earlier in life.
  I'd much rather have a compelling story nowadays.
- My g/f has been on the gamepass for the entire year that I have known her, and in that time has purchased one game, when it was removed from game pass. I tried out game pass for 1 month so I could access diablo 4 so we could play together on the pass, (I play on PC,) which had many other I wanted to play, like clair obscur expedition 33 and Frost Punk 2. The blizzard laucher has had some D4 free trials that I was able to do without a game pass sub, but sadly no cross platform play. During my time with gamepass I realized that for the cost of 2-3 months of game pass, I could own one of the games I wanted.
  My g/f and I have had this discussion over and over. Eventually games get removed from the pass, meaning you lose access to a title unless you purchase it. Game pass is in essence a subscription model to demo games. Game demos used to be free. I remember getting disc demos for ps1 and ps2 games. Hell even some games on steam still offer free demos. Paying a subscription to demo and/or beta test a game is bonkers. I told my g/f I have no control over how she spends her disposable income, but I'm not paying for the pass. (I'm 10 years older than her, so I remember a time when you owned the games you bought, rather than paying rent to have access, which likely contributes to our difference in opinion.) I would straight up stop gaming all together if steam started charging a subscription to access the games I bought.
  If MS was smart, they would pull a game from the pass after 1-3 months. People that feel they really enjoyed it are more likely to buy it, and others that thought the game was meh were never going to buy it anyway. But some of these games they have kept on the pass for 6 months or more. Based on the fact that they put one of their own franchises on the pass, these fuckers are not smart. They are robbing the studio that made the game to inflate game pass sub numbers.
  
  Game pass is in essence a subscription model to demo games.
  I'm not pro Game Pass either, but this is misrepresentative. Game Pass isn't for demoing, it's for the large number of people who just don't return to games after playing them. They don't care about owning their games, and they may not even care that much about choosing their games, so Game Pass gives them things to do and plenty of hot new things to jump into while everyone is talking about them, all without ever having to pony up for anything specific unless it's the rare case of something they want to play more/again after it leaves Game Pass.
  It's like the old console market where one would buy a game, then trade it in for credit on the next game. You feed money in to have things to play, and then some more if you actually want to keep something and have to make up for its trade in on the next game. Especially since things are probably getting discounted by the time they leave Game Pass, so the sub+price-to-keep may still end up being comparable/better than the original buy price.
  It's just a different way of experiencing gaming, and Microsoft is obviously still trying to figure out exactly how much they can milk that market for that convenience. Quite a few smaller games can probably make more from Game Pass than they would from sales alone, because fewer people would buy the game than consider it added value on their Game Pass sub, and multiplayer games can jump-start their communities without going free.
The article addresses a lot of the speculation about these numbers:
This is an internal estimate that was leaked to the gaming press, and so is likely designed to be an underestimate, if anything, since it makes the entire XBox division look bad for cannibalizing their own sales (although most likely this was a best estimate).
A whopping 82% of full-price sales of BO6 was on PS5, the one platform that does not have GamePass
Inflated piracy numbers are addressed directly by the writer, although no specifics are given in relation to this number since the modeling was not disclosed
So, I think a lot of other commenters are unreasonably dismissing this number as inflated when it's likely fairly accurate.
- The funniest part about this comment is that's how GAME pass has always worked. They offer it to titles for a lump cash payment in lieu of sales. Now that they own Activision, therefore BOPS6, they care about those lost sales.
  When they didn't make enough software for the last decade for it to be a problem for their bottom line, they didn't.
  But it sure as shit effected literally every game ever on Game Pass. It is and always has been a literal loss leader for every single game on it, they just now give a crap because one of those bigger games is finally theirs.
  When Hi-fi rush exploded in popularity, it was because it was discovered on game pass. Where it then went on to be played by millions, while the team behind it made nothing, so Microsoft closed the studio. Literally because the game wasn't profitable enough after MS decided to force shadow drop it on game pass at launch.
  But sure, BOPS6, "lost" them millions on Gamepass and they care about how Gamepass affects the sales of that title.
  I've never seen a company speed run leaving the console market as fast as Xbox is. Gives me post Dreamcast Sega Vibes.
Subscription > point of sale. It's way more profitable to be a landlord than a shop keeper. That's why everything is subscription now.
- Especially when you aren't consistently providing a quality product. If every game is a hit, people will buy them all, but if your games are hit or miss, you keep making revenue regardless.
- But they lost money
  
  No they didn't.
  That's if you're naive/childish/innocent enough to assume that everyone playing this on game pass would've bought it if game pass wasn't an option.
  Same backwards logic to convince useful idiots that each pirated copy is a lost sale.
  Not everyone is an innocent child with disneyvision who believes corporations and their employees are there friends.
- Wait untill you hear about loans and regular interest payments lol.
  A more refined method of generating consistent, regular cashflow, rofl.
  (Ahem, at least in theory, but then when that stops working, surprise! you get a bailout!)
  ... But yeah, the natural evolution we should expect is that MSFT (or Hulu or any other sub based service) will soon or at least eventually partner with something like klarna to offer 3-6 month payment loan options ... for every recurring monthly subscription payment.
  Think about it.
  What that means is that... well, if you cancel on month 5, you're still making payments through month 8, or month 11.
  So ... should you really go 3 - 6 months paying for not having something?
  Or just keep your subscription going?
  Loans are literally the OG of 'dark pattern', MTX style bullshit, its a perfect match made in hell.
  Hypercapitalism, away!!!
  
  I have wondered when they will push to increase minimum subscription duration. Presumably if too many people frequently sub for a single month.
But lost sales for Black Ops was calculated from the beginning. The idea was in exchange the Game Pass subscriptions would go up. Nothing revolutionary here.
- Also all this shitty mtx they pushed front and center in the game.
Ain't no way I was gonna be buying BO7 on launch until I played it and made sure it was decently optimized. I've been baited too often by games running/being fine during beta/open access only for it to be a completely different story on launch day.
I was going to get it via Game Pass for the first month before, now that they lost sales I definitely will be lol
- Isn't this something everyone should do with every game? No pre-order, wait until reviews are out. If not really needed, then wait until patches are out, maybe with a small or big sale on the game price too. Almost all AAA games launch broken or unoptimized.
  
  Pre-orders are bad for players and bad for devs. They're only good for publishers.
Me and my buddy got gamepass for a month to try BO6 on our PCs. We didn't end up keeping it after that (we just don't care about newer cods that much), but there's no way we would have tried the game otherwise for the 70$ to actually purchase it.
I feel like this is a piece Microsoft put out there to try to make the price increase feel justified.
I have to imagine they're around the cut even point with $240/year for gamepass (given that's four "AAA" games a year). With the price hike to $360/year, they're assuming the average user would normally buy 6 games per year at full price. I just don't think that's the average gamer, but I could be wrong.
- Actually remember seeing some numbers on this a while ago and I was pretty shocked at how few games the average person buys. Like median ps3 owner bought 7 games over the life of the entire console.
  From looking around google quickly it looks like the average for ps4/5 is 6-10 depending on region.
  So if someone stays subscribed to the service for the life of the console then Microsoft comes out way ahead compared to just selling games, I would guess
  
  Yeah, it's possible that the group who would buy gamepass arent the norm and they'd normally buy 10+ games. But even then, they'd have to be buying 10+ games a year within the gamepass library to be canabilizing sales.
  Either way, they picked a really bad time given the state of the world to be raising prices by 50%.
- I'm not average I'm sure, but I buy 0 games a year at full price 😅
  
  Same. Benefits of being a patient gamer. Dozens of games for the price of full priced games. Hardware costs less too, since I don't need the latest and greatest being couple years behind triple a titles people are playing now.
Future profit of $300M can result in a nice Christmas bonus. Imagine myself on that meeting where everyone is making up numbers until they are big enough.
Even without gamepass, I doubt there would be a significant dent on the total sales % being on playstation consoles, since xbox consoles sold a lot less this gen (30mil vs 80mil | xbox vs ps5)
Good. Fuck Microsoft.
- This isn't the "good, this will fuck up Microsoft" you're looking for..They are perfectly fine with people paying through subscriptions instead of sales.

38 comments