Comment on Xbox wanted 77M Game Pass subscribers by 2026 — today it has less than half that
tempest@lemmy.ca 3 days agoI’m not sure it was a mistake. Netflix but games is a pretty compelling offer but the industry has just constantly mistepped over and over with jumping the gun on ending disk based sales and it has poisoned the well a little bit on digital offerings.
Plus the game industry constantly makes ridiculous projections they fail to meet. MS was always going to have to burn money for years to get this off the ground if they even manage it.
To their credit at least they didn’t Google it up like Stadia.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
You can’t compare it to Google Stadia or Netflix in the sense of, that these companies don’t have anything else to sell as games. So they didn’t hurt their existing business. In example Netflix did hurt traditional business, they just didn’t have one themselves. Like Game Pass hurt traditional business, and XBOX has a traditional business. And Stadia itself wasn’t actually like Game Pass, because one had to buy the games and it was streaming only. So totally different category here.
I think that Game Pass wasn’t healthy for the XBOX structure, because there was less incentive to buy games. And Game Pass wouldn’t make much sense with low profile and indie games only, so they had to include blockbusters. And Game Pass needs a quick stream of games from first party. But blockbuster games are also extremely expensive and take a long time to make. So they had to be sold enough to be profitable, because including them in Game Pass alone is not enough (Call of Duty is the proof).