Xbox Game Pass Subscribers Spend More and Play More on Games - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 08 April 2021 / 2,218 Views
Microsoft’s Sarah Bond has revealed to Forbes some stats about Xbox Game Pass subscribers. She says they spend 20 more on gaming overall, play 30 percent more games, spend 20 percent more time playing games, and play 40 percent more genres.
"When you subscribe to a channel that enables you to watch a video, like Netflix," she says, "that’s kind of the end of the monetization cycle that you have with that piece of content.
"In gaming it’s the opposite: there are items that you can buy in the game, there are extensions you can buy, there’s a next franchise you can purchase, there are other genres that you can leap to."
She added, "There are 200 million people who buy a console, and there are 3 billion people who play games. Today, a lot of those people don’t have the option to play many of these amazing experiences and iconic games that you see.
"When you really look at what we’re doing with Game Pass is we’re making that possible by linking that to subscription, and putting our streaming into subscription. We’re able to make the economics of all that work."
Earlier this month Microsoft completed its acquisition of Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media and added 20 Bethesda games to Xbox Game Pass. The list of games available coming to Game Pass include popular franchises like Dishonored, Doom, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Wolfenstein.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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She's right, anyone who thought game pass wouldn't make an insane amount of money was never looking at the entire picture.
More? More than who? MS customers that are non-Gamepass subscribers?
I assume so as there isn't any other basis of comparison. Lovely to see the inarticulate-defenders-of-their-sentiment squad gave you a downvote for that basic question.
The article actually goes into broader perspective than the synopsis here and most people's take on it (including discussing of PS+), with things like "[Apparent increases in revenue] could always change if Game Pass and other subscriptions become a bigger part of the industry overall". Since it's easy to find anecdotes of customers buying game anyways despite getting it free within subscription, but not clear how that scales if GP was so successful to take over vast majority of market. Or if they do raise prices to cover more game offerings, if that will just raise consumer spending vs just taking overr larger portion of market i.e. not growing the pie.
Anyways, I think it's too hard to get serious discussion here, too many people looking to gratify-justify their own consumer preferences. Stuff like this often follows a curve of development with early offering excessively generous but things get tweaked later for profitability (that's why MS doesn't care that much about immediate profitability, that's for after they achieve market growth), you can see that in how Netflix operates or probably the worst example there was US startup offering movie ticket subscriptions that finally went bankrupt after repeatedly worsening their offering to try to become profitable after losing a bunch of money with initial offering. But plenty of people enjoyed it while it lasted.
Netflix has raised its prices a little but as a service it is better than ever.
It would be even more profitable if they raise the price and they definitely will do that in time.
Oh for sure! It's only a matter of time unless tens of millions of people start signing up every quarter, it's really hard to see how they're able to keep deals with say EA justifiable. Although, it kind of seems like Game Pass is also a way for you to try the game, then get you to buy the full game if you like it that much. On PC, Game Pass kind of sucks lol not in game library, but in infrastructure. It's still very much in beta, yet nearly all first party Xbox games is available on Steam minus Halo Wars 2, Halo 5, Rare Replay, and Forza Motorsport. I can see with the Xbox app in beta, they'll get you to sign up for Game Pass on PC, try out a game, buy the ones that you really like on Steam. It's a win-win for Microsoft.
Not surprising. I imagine that if Prime/Hulu/Netflix etc had monetization options for every piece of media on their services, people would be spending more their, too. You get all these games for a low price, you might be more apt to spend money on them. I know most of my Xbox friends will spend money on GP games just to support the devs if they like the game.
People act as if we all don’t know a price increase is coming. Of course it’s coming. There are strong rumors that MS is adding Ubisoft+ to GamePass. Ubi+ gives you day one access to Ubisoft titles plus any DLC. Whether this happens or not, a price increase is happening at some point, it’s how all of these services work. They also are rumored to be bringing more AAA games day one like Outriders, this will cost money.
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