Well, that's certainly not going to reassure Xbox fans. Just seems like they're waiting for things to die down before confirming the rumors. It will be interesting to see how that goes. If they start treating PlayStation the way Sony treats PC in terms of releases then I could maybe see the Xbox consoles staying afloat as a Gamepass box. I've seen speculation that they'll pull out of the console market entirely, but I just can't see Gamepass coming to the PS5 or Switch especially since Sony has been trying to build up their own answer to Gamepass with their PS plus tiers. Then again stranger things have happened. If they do decide to become the next Sega it's going to be surreal watching Halo and Gears of War show up on PlayStation.
The house is going on fire and they wanna take their sweet time finding the most optimal faucet?
That basically confirms every rumor about this. It wouldn't take a week to prepare a statement if it wasn't the tectonic shift it is rumored to be. Damn.
I haven’t kept the closest eye on this - rumor is they’re planning to port more of their games to competing platforms, maybe allow 3rd party Xbox hardware, and phase out most physical Xbox games, right? Or am I way off the mark?
Basically. The main rumor is that Starfield, the new Indiana Jones game, and all of their other first-party exclusives are going to be coming to PS5 and Microsoft is giving up on the idea of console exclusivity. Not sure what that means for Xbox in the long-term, but it is going to be an interesting week.
Yes, because console wars. A lot of people that bought into the Xbox brand are angry Microsoft is "giving up" and "disgracing" developers by putting their games on PlayStation. It doesn't help that without a clear statement from Microsoft people are free to speculate that Microsoft is going to be the next Sega and Phil Spencer is going to personally come to their house and destroy their Xbox.
More seriously, there is some genuine concern about what will happen to the digital libraries of people who bought into the Xbox eco-system if Xbox stops being a thing. Or what will happen if the AAA game market comes down to Sony and Nintendo. But there are a lot of people angry their favorite mega-corporation "lost" even though we have no idea what Microsoft's actual plans are.
I can partly understand the frustration. If you bought a Series X/S instead of a PS5, you must have put some amount of faith in Xbox exclusives to make it worth missing out on Sony exclusives. Now, after an abysmal half-generation, it seems like Xbox is giving up on exclusives altogether. So what was the point in buying an Xbox? If PS5 gets all Xbox exclusives, then an Xbox retroactively becomes a really dumb purchase.
Wouldn’t that be a good thing? More access to different titles? Usually the ‘see you and hear you’ line is used when a company gets caught doing vile shit and wants to pretend they care
And everyone else just realizes how bad this means things are going for the gaming industry as a whole.
This isn’t good news for anyone who likes actually owning their games instead of just having a license, if they own a console.
That ship sailed in PC gaming forever ago, which is honestly fine considering storefronts like GOG exist, but it’s still going to be a gut-punch to people who have invested financially heavily in the Xbox ecosystem.
It’s going to mean smaller selections of games, more gambling/gacha bullshit, and “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” will dominate the industry. When licensing runs out for music, they’ll just pull a game instead of trying to “fix” it, if it’s not profitable enough. We’re entering an era where there will be a dead-zone of lost media and history because so much of it is increasingly locked up behind corporate barriers.
It’s going to mean smaller selections of games, more gambling/gacha bullshit, and “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” will dominate the industry. When licensing runs out for music, they’ll just pull a game instead of trying to “fix” it, if it’s not profitable enough. We’re entering an era where there will be a dead-zone of lost media and history because so much of it is increasingly locked up behind corporate barriers.
I have some bad news about the past few years for you…
The worrying aspect is that they seem to be trying to make non gamepass users pay for the development of gamepass games.
Gamepass is a massive drain on Microsoft, and numbers appear to have flatlined and not enough to pay for all the games made by Bethesda, Id, obsidian, Activision, blizzard and so much more.
So now I think they want to get non gamepass users to pay for the development and have gamepass users get the same deal they always did. Which is imo setting the industry up for some very turbulent times in the future as the cost of gamepass is buried under this, and the Xbox platform is further weakened as it gets deeper into the “no one buys games” pit.
Considering how many subscribers they have and the cost, they are making a heck of a lot. They own many of the titles on there now with the Bethesda takeover. I can’t imagine they would agree to any deal that would put them in such a position again (licensing costing more than subs, it would scale), after what they did with the contracts for the original Xbox whereby cost did not decrease on some of the hardware (or something weird like that).
they don’t have the income from retail games any-more, if you’re an Xbox player, you almost certainly have gamepass. which means you aren’t paying for a single game they produce. A decade ago a new Halo would come out and that would be 100 million in revenue day one. Now it’s nothing.
They have to pay for the entire cost of development of multiple game studios. I’ll highlight the ones for relevance, these are studios they have to pay salaries for hundreds of people for every month, as well as all the other costs of development, and then get no payday. Gamepass has to (but doesn’t) pay for all of these: Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax Online Studios, id Software, Arkane Studios, Machine Games, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games, Roundhouse Studios, Blizzard, Treyarch, Infinity Ward, High Moon Studios, Toys for Bob, Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, Beenox, Radical Entertainment, Rare, 343 Industries, The Coalition, Mojang. Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, Obsidian Entertainment, InXile Entertainment, Double Fine
Then they have to licence all the other games on gamepass, all the third party stuff on there currently that microsoft does not own. Again, this means that they don’t make any money from game sales of those products, and also have to pay for them. Gamepass subscriptions currently probably covers this cost just about
Currently Gamepass can only exist thanks to microsoft azure and office 365. those to microsoft services pay for gamepass game development. This is why no other company does this, only microsoft can front the money from their other businesses.
30m last year, over $10 per month on average, $350m+ a month, plus game sales which, contrary to what you’ve said, still exist. New titles result in more console sales and more subscribers. They haven’t shifted to this model to make less money.
I want to be extremely clear about this, game sales functionally do not exist. We are not going to be discussing the validity of if xbox gamers purchasing Xbox games. We know they are not.
New titles are not resulting in more console sales and subscribers, as those have flatlined.
They have indeed shifted to this model to make less money so that they can be the one making money in a decade. It’s extremely short-sighted to claim otherwise.
Update: The LinkedIn profile in question removed the references to the “30 million” milestone. Microsoft reiterated to us in a statement that 25 million remains the last official milestone.
literally from your article.
from another ign article
“We’re seeing slowing adoption of Xbox Game Pass even though Microsoft will claim otherwise thanks to the repositioning of Xbox Live Gold as Xbox Game Pass Core,” McWhirter says. “Our forecast estimates total Xbox Game Pass subscriptions (excluding Core/Live Gold) to be at 33.3 million at the end of 2023, which represents subscriber growth of just 13% - down from 15% in 2022. Piscatella notes too on X/Twitter that subscription services specifically aren’t growing as fast as they used to.
Not surprised, it feels like E3 has been on life-support for a while now. Still disappointed to know that it's over. Back in the day E3 was a highlight of the summer. Maybe it's just nostalgia talking but classic E3 was just so exciting. All these major announcements dropping at once combined with all the booths showing off new games. It was just great. I guess we have the Game Awards and Summer Games Fest as the big gaming events, but none of them feel quite like E3 use to.
E3 was great before communication became constant. E3 used to be one of the only times you’d be able to hear from the developers themselves, even if they were highly choreographed speeches and interviews we still got something. Social media kind of took some of that magic away since we could hear from developers all the time. It took away their motivation to carefully craft messages and shows since they can now communicate with fans basically all the time.
Probably after all major studios pulled out. Turns out dumping tons of money on huge marketing shows that usually turn out a ton of drama probably isn’t the best spend of money. It’s much cheaper to run your own announcements under your own control. The better game show for fans would be PAX.
Not to mention there’s the benefit to companies of being better able to manage the production of the announcements and avoid the random pitfalls that can happen at live shows. They can make sure the games they are announcing look their best and they can control their message. All three major console companies have had their versions of E3 failures that have led to major embarrassments for them in the past. They would rather not have that happen to them again if they can help it.
It’s popularity was slowly waning and companies have been slowly pulling back on the marketing at the expo for almost a decade. Over the pandemic period the largest gaming names (Nintendo, Sony, etc) pulled out entirely and created their own marketing events of a similar style that were cheaper and easier to maintain while still accomplishing the same thing. E3 was left as a bunch of disjointed marketing events held around the same time. Geoff Kneighlys events ended up filling in the void it left over this period and E3 just never recovered.
When the pandemic effectively suspended E3, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft started producing direct videos. They haven’t been interested in going back.
I’m sure someone will do a full postmortem write-up on E3, but with this sort of thing, there’s a sort of inertia involved. Once something happens that pauses a regular gathering and makes everyone wonder “why were we doing this again?” there are times the gathering doesn’t come back.
E3 was king in the age before widespread social media marketing campaigns. You’d go to those shows to showcase everything to the media to generate hype at one of the biggest events of the year. Those journalists would then go back and write all about it, giving the upcoming projects hype and attention.
Now with social media it’s more effective for brands to run their own campaigns. You can spend millions on an E3 presentation or you can give streamers/YouTubers review copies for free and get a ton of good press.
Once the big companies pulled out it became a lot less attractive to go, then the pandemic seems to have put the final nail in the coffin.
Every year became a competition, and it was unsustainable. Companies could spend millions on their presentation only to “lose” and get their reveals drowned out because Sony announced FF7 or Microsoft got Elder Scrolls etc. On all sides there was a rush to be the winner of the year, and it led to more and more CGI trailers of things 5+ years away just for the big reveal moment. I imagine both Sony and Microsoft would prefer to announce individual games as they come throughout the year, so their reveal is the only big gaming news of the week and everyone is talking about it.
@jonathan_vdw about the T7G VR soundtrack release “Final masters in! I’ll be submitting for release on Streaming platforms later today. Bandcamp will see the release some time next week and the rest will follow a bit later.
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