1/23/2024 0 Comments Forza horizon 4 lego![]() ![]() Now, how many Game Pass subscribers there are with respect to the total number of consoles? Isn’t that 22 to 26 million subscribers for around 80 million Xbox with (console specific) growth having been somewhat stalled for a while? (not including PC as attempting to get a proportion including it is meaningless) If the ones getting two to three games amount to 33% of the available (assume a normal distribution and use some reasonable stdev to get a more precise number if you care) then that’s a lot of players bringing in as much or more money than a GP subscription. That means that unless there is some crazy skewed distribution half of the players will actually get more than that. Let’s say we have an attach rate of 6 games per console/player for 1.2 full price games per year. The rest of your arguments are kinda weak without concrete data. Same with movies… A movie ticket is way cheaper than a videogame with no barrier for entry yet Hogwarts Legacy still managed to get half as much money as the third best performing movie of history. What’s the point of mentioning second hand purchases? If I sell a physical copy of a game for half the price the publisher is not going to “double dip” when reporting sales numbers. That should tell you how few games people are actually buying. ![]() Even with you and your mates valiantly trying to push that number up, attach rates are very, very low. The only difference is that it costs Valve nothing for someone to set up an account, whereas Xbox loses money on a console sale. ![]() Presuming (erroneously) that all those accounts are real and active or potentially active, Valve would kill to monetise them in the way MS is trying with Game Pass. The average number of games owned by a Steam account is a little over 10. If you're spending as much money on Steam deals as on three or four full price releases, you're not part of this discussion so are irrelevant. This isn't relevant to what we're talking about. And that's without talking about how many of those full price copies then circulated in the used market. Even in the best year of gaming possibly ever and even with your highest (and optimistic) estimate of 1/2 being full price sales, as many bought these games reduced than at full price, and most didn't buy them at all. You've basically made my other point for me. With the full might of the Harry Potter IP behind it too. That's hundreds of millions of potential console sales, and many more potential PC sales. Then consider that it released on six different platforms, including PC. I'm not diminishing incredible sales numbers. I'm talking purely in terms of individual engagement with a potential audience. Hogwarts Legacy did 18m? Which sounds staggering, until you compare it to mobile games or the amount of people who walked in to see Avatar 2 in cinemas. The vast, vast majority of games don't sell nearly as many copies as those you've listed, and the games you've listed don't sell especially well. Individually these games sell well by the standards that we set for games selling well on console. That in itself is more complicated than I'm making it out, because that last guy is probably subscribing to Game Pass and still potentially buying the games, but that's by the by. Microsoft would rather have 10 guys like this subscribing, because it monetises someone who bought the console (at a cost to Microsoft) and then spent nothing, than the one guy who will buy the games anyway. He's unlikely to randomly buy any of these games full price, just because he wants them, if he doesn't do it in the initial launch period. He'll buy the big games used, at a deep discount or not at all. The further from release we get, the more true it becomes. If a random guy plays five games on Game Pass in a year - Let's say Starfield, Lego Star Wars, Celeste, Toem and Forza Horizon 4 - there is a non-zero chance he pays nothing to Microsoft for doing so if Game Pass didn't exist. The attach rate for all but a few outlying consoles is less than 10, and usually far less than 10. It might be good for selling Game Pass ("I only need to buy two game's worth and look at everything I get") but the reality is way more complicated. But this is still the wrong way of looking at it. ![]()
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