A brand new Bloomberg report primarily based on interviews with former Microsoft workers has supplied extra gasoline for hypothesis in regards to the continued viability of Game Pass, together with Microsoft’s personal alleged estimate for the way a lot gross sales income Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 misplaced by being on the subscription service.
Unlike Steam, which affords its personal real-time metrics whereas additionally being monitored by third events like SteamDB, Game Pass is a black field, with solely periodic updates from Microsoft—or insider data like that obtained by Bloomberg—to supply an impression of the service’s well being. Microsoft says it’s rising and common, however Xbox has been on a gradual drumbeat of mass layoffs and studio closures in recent times.
One of the employees speaking to Bloomberg cited the $300 million figure as an internal estimate. I’ve seen some skepticism about the figure, and a comparison to how publishers count every pirate download of a game as a missed sale when prosecuting pirates or commenting publicly on piracy’s impact, but I don’t think that quite maps on to what’s going on here.
This is an internal estimate that was never meant to be public, and it casts a negative light on a flagship project at the company—the incentive when making this estimate was to be as accurate as possible. We don’t know how Microsoft produced the figure, but it was presumably the result of fairly sophisticated projections.
Kotaku did some again of the serviette math exhibiting that Game Pass would have required an inflow of 15 million new Ultimate-tier subscribers for one month, or 1.25 million over a complete 12 months (pre-price hike), to make up the distinction of Black Ops 6’s misplaced gross sales. Game Pass’ total subscriber rely was 34 million in 2024, a determine Microsoft has not up to date this 12 months.
There’s a kaleidoscopic number of pricing tiers and subscription durations between these two extremes, and that is additionally all to only match the income Microsoft theoretically might have had promoting the sport usually, when the writer would presumably prefer to see its flagship gaming endeavor end in stronger income than the outdated mannequin.
Despite all of that, IGN reported on the time of Black Ops 6’s launch that it set a series sales record, in addition to a file for brand new Game Pass subscriptions on a single day. As Bloomberg factors out, nevertheless, the gross sales file was with 82% of full value gross sales of Black Ops 6 happening on PlayStation 5, regardless of this being Call of Duty’s first launch as a Microsoft-owned property.
With Microsoft holding a decent lid on the total story of Game Pass’ well being, in addition to what mixed metric of Game Pass and retail numbers it makes use of to find out a person sport’s success or failure, we largely must extrapolate how issues are doing primarily based on the writer’s public actions.
Microsoft has been closing studios and elevating costs, most notably on Game Pass itself this previous week, which continues to depart me involved for the well being of the trade as a complete given the speedy consolidation of triple-A growth below Microsoft and Sony in recent times. I stand by my assertion that we’re all paying for Microsoft’s massive wager on Game Pass.