Phil Spencer: Xbox Game Pass is 'Very Sustainable Right Now' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 15 November 2021 / 1,946 Views
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer speaking with Axios says Xbox Game Pass is "very sustainable " with how it is right now and he says it continues to grow.
"I know there's a lot of people that like to write [that] we're burning cash right now for some future pot of gold at the end," Spencer said. "No. Game Pass is very, very sustainable right now as it sits. And it continues to grow."
Spencer added he expects mobile to become the biggest part of the Xbox community in the future due to the number of people who have smartphones.
"At some point in our future, more people are going to be part of the Xbox community on mobile than they are on any other device, just by the nature of how many mobile phones there are," he said.
He doesn't want to alienate console players, as he clearly remembers the issues of the Xbox One in its early days.
"I can't wait for 20 more years of Xbox," Spencer said.
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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Sustainable for a company worth $1 trillion maybe.
Yeah notice he said sustainable not profitable
Exactly, if it's so sustainable then why are they hiding the numbers yet again for it?
There’s no way it’s profitable yet, it takes years for these services to build a customer base
I don't understand how you got this many downvotes
A couple of salty console warriorz who pay for Chartz Gold or whatever so they can vote four times on articles LOL
Well he does suggest the service isn't burning money. I also think most of their spending is on buying studios.
More like $2.5T! I believe they have overtaken Apple.
Very interested to see how Gamepass turns out.
I believe Phil's mobile ambitions will be a disappointment. Imho, mobile gamers don't want to play games made for xbox, and who are focused on the xbox controller, on phone screen, they prefer cell games made with cell phones in mind. Also F2P running on "hardware" with "optional MTX" is king in cell phones, i have a hard time seeing Xcloud in this market. I mean, it's just too hard to sell Cloud gaming when cellphones have enough hardware to play lot's of good things, for FREE!
Edit: unless, ofcourse, they start making games that are "cell phone first", and consoles second... on these term it can work, but will likely suck for console players. =/
It really all depends on the game. Games like Hades, Yakuza: LaD, Unpacked, etc. play great. Of course some games play better than others, but as long as you have a solid internet connection, xcloud is a very playable experience for all games. It's only gotten better as time has gone on, it will continue to get better.
I think Sarah Bond mentioned recently they want to acquire devs with a is focus on casual and social games on the service, which I'm sure has something to do with getting more mobile friendly games. This doesn't mean they will stop focusing on the hardcore game experiences, but offer casual/mobile friendly games to what they already have. Zero reason to sacrifice one for another, when their goal is to have a well rounded mix of different games.
I've played a bunch of Destiny 2 via XCloud . Works great! Theoretically, I could hook my phone up to a TV, in a hotel room for example, and play my XB games there.
The problem is not the quality of xCloud (which is fantastic) but the fact that smartphones aren't really made for console gaming, at least currently
im sure Microsoft knows what they are doing!
As Microsoft adds more of their back catalogue in to Game Pass, plus all new first-party releases over time, it will eventually reach a point where there is so much Microsoft-owned content in there that they don't need to bring in many third-party titles at all. At that point, they get to keep most of the Game Pass revenue for themselves if they want to. It'll be interesting to see how much third-party content they continue to incorporate as the first-party catalogue grows and grows and grows.
Of course it's sustainable. Never in doubt, the service if you do the maths is making a fortune.
Please explain, in details, how you get to your conclusion.
Other people (99.99% of the industry people I know), agree with me that MS has been pumping a shitton of money into this hole, all things taken into account.
Like i said do the maths. Work out how many are subscribed, how much you believe are paying monthly for the service ($1 customers) and multiply that by years and you have a service earning fortunes. The only way its not profiting is if you include the Bestheda buyout in the same results. Also the fact they said its sustainable means they are profiting because no buisness wants to tell thier paying customers they are making too much money because thats how they get uproars when they decide to raise the price in the future. Buisness strategies.
That's not "do the math", that is wishful thinking.
Has it ever occured to you that maintaining the infrastructure costs money, a lot of money? For a start, how much do you think Sony pays Amazon/MS server group for the network infrastructure? How much do you think the XBox group pays the server group for the same services? Do they freeload, for political reasons (political reasons = can talk profits although there aren't any)?
We are not talking a few $ per user, we are talking nine digit numbers.
There are a lot of other costly things involved which are never mentioned, but people who have worked in the industry are aware of those, hence the general opinion is that Gamepass has been a money pit so far.
MS owns thier own network so they aren't paying anyone except themselves. Thats the flaw with your logic and these so called insiders you are referring to.
I don't think you have any idea how the "big industry" works. There is no free lunch, period. If a division of a company wants something from another division of the same company, bills are written. I was involved with several large/huge companies and it worked that way, everywhere, every time.
The fact that the same company pays itself may be confusing to some, but it is standard practise. It may well be that the server division has been writing 0$ bills to the games division (by order of the highest-ups), but this has simply been subsidising the games division (and my guess is the server division would not happy at all about it if that has been the modus operandy ever, to put it mildly).
In short: my suspicion is that the games division looks good because they have been freeloading on the server division.
So nice of people to be concerned about whether poor widlle Micwosawft is making a profit. <3
When yo swimming in cash like microsoft of course u can "very suistanable this at the moment". Hahaha!
