46% of PS and Nintendo Gamers in the US Would Consider Xbox Game Pass If It Adds Activision Titles - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 07 April 2022 / 2,936 Views
46 percent of PlayStation and Nintendo gamers in the US would considering subscribing to Xbox Game Pass if it adds Activision Blizzard titles, according to a new poll from YouGov. This compares to 43 percent of Xbox gamers, 42 percent of PC gamers, and 27 percent of gamers who use a smartphone.
In the UK, it is 48 percent of Xbox gamers, 29 percent of PlayStation gamers, 26 percent of Nintendo and PC gamers, and 20 percent of smartphone gamers.
The poll also asked what Activision Blizzard IP would make them consider subscribing to Xbox Game Pass and unsurprisingly Call of Duty was number one with 19 percent of US gamers and 11 percent of UK gamers. No other IP from the publisher hit double digits.
Microsoft announced on January 18, 2022 it is acquiring Activision Blizzard in a deal worth $68.7 billion. IPs that will be owned by Microsoft once the deal closes include Call of Duty, Warcraft, Candy Crush, Tony Hawk, Diablo, Overwatch, Spyro, Hearthstone, Guitar Hero, Crash Bandicoot, StarCraft, and more.
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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Game Pass is just too damn good even without the Blizzard/Acti acquisition. Seems a lot of gamers on other platforms are keeping it real with their interests. Very good!
Exactly. It wasn’t for me for years till Bethesda titles were added then I finally just added my card for it to be billed indefinitely.
I just haven't enjoyed it as much as I would have liked. Seems like I've already played the game, don't want to play the game, or games I wanted to play I ended up not liking. Like last time I signed up for Octopath and Scarlet nexus and hated both. Tried some other games like Ori and just wasn't feeling it.
Right... but playing a game that you end up NOT buying because you didn't like it as much as you expected is an amazing benefit to a subscription service! An inexpensive monthly fee that saves you a bunch of money on games you don't like, that you might have otherwise bought? That's all kinds of win.
I think this also demonstrates that it probably doesn’t matter to Microsoft whether COD stays on PlayStation or not, because they win either way.
I'd also like to add after reviewing the question. This simply questions people if they would consider signing up for the service. It doesn't really detail if people would consider switching off their playstationnintendo console to use it. Poll questions always relay on how the question is worded depending on what answer you get. Most recently the no fly zone over ukraine demonstrated this. People were for it until you mentioned that this would lead to WW3 and then they decided against it. So this many people might be interested in signing up for the service until you mention you will have to purchase a PCXbox in order to use it.
Nothing Activision has is worth switching systems for.
Nintendo gamers play Nintendo or similar games. I don't think Activision games are their cup of tea.
Does anyone even care about OW 2?.
I was thinking the same thing, especially the Nintendo loyalist that haven't owned another system these past few generations. They have lived along time with weak Activision support.
re-read what I said, I said Nintendo loyalist that haven't owned other systems these past few generations...if own both the Series X and PS you wouldn't qualify as that group of gamer.
Nintendo loyalists only bought 10 million Wii U, they are irrelevant. Nintendo is strong because they have the GP, not their loyalists
I am a Nintendo loyalist. I own all of their consoles since nes and own all handheld since game boy. My first introduction to gaming was the nes! U will be suprised that most Nintendo gamers either own a Nintendo machine plus ps or nintendo plus xbox.
Who goes around negging all of your posts, how sad ?
It looks like I'm more of a minority than I originally thought. Not really a fan of subscription based models. That said, as long as it doesn't take the place of traditional purchases, more power to them.
Phil has previously stated that the traditional purchase method is still a big part of their business. Xbox actually tries to give you an incentive to buy games by adding a discount to every game you purchase if you're a Game Pass subscriber lol. But, I do have a feeling traditional purchases will be a thing of the past in the somewhat not so distant future, which I'm personally not a fan of.
Activision has not been a selling point for me since the 2600
The next Pitfall will be one Gamepass day 1.
I could see some ps gamers saying that. But Nintendo? There's no way. Activition blizzard dosent even suport the console. Theres been like 2 games in like its all life on it. I would not be surprise if its Nintendo gamers that also have a PlayStation or other meand to game.
Not entirely true. Activision has put all their family friendly oriented franchises on Switch like Crash N Sane Trilogy, Crash 4, Crash Team Racing, Tony Hawk 1&2, and Spyro Reignited Trilogy. Then from Blizzard you got Overwatch, Blizzard Arcade Collection, Diablo III and Diablo II Resurrected. A friend of mine even got the Diablo III limited edition Switch console.
So, they've basically put everything but CoD on the Switch, which honestly, would be more up Nintendo gamers alley. Microsoft wants more family friendly games on their service and Activision does have the IPs for that. Now Xbox needs to have Activision make new games in those franchises to add to the service to entice Nintendo gamers, which unlike CoD, those games could be exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem. Not to mention, Xbox will have Skylanders at their disposal as well.
I wouldn't, Activision is a 0 mover for me. Even if all became exclusive to Xbox I wouldn't care for my gaming needs.
Yes but nobody base an opinion on a... One person feeling. It doesnt matter.
I can't imagine what the already impressive Game Pass catalog will look like when these games get added. Of course you know a ton of CoD games, but how far back in the franchise will Xbox go? You also think Crash N Sane Trilogy, Crash 4, Spyro trilogy, Tony Hawk 1&2, Diablo II Resurrected, Overwatch, and maaaaaaybe World of Warcraft being added to PC Game Pass?
So it doesn't surprise me one bit that many gamers will keep their options open when it comes to the value Game Pass offers.
The only GP that would ever appear on PS would be akin to the EA play one - namely a GP containing only 1st party studio games with everything else stripped from the offering. Everything else which is part of GP would be excluded as it clashes with what Sony offered. MSFT would then have to ensure games are included in the PS+ tiers which contain the service akin to PSNOW which has EA games.
If Sony allows EA to do it, i can't see why they wouldn't allow a GP on PS containing only MSFT games. At what price I am not sure and they'd probably also insist on it not being linked to other platform services so the Sony GP isn't included as part of the list of platforms you can you use your GP on, it would be a separate offering.
MS needs to work out deals to get GP on PS and/or Switch. Even if they have to shrink the libraries or increase the price in order to make the deals happen, it seems like there is market demand.
Once they have have Activision, even if MS only included their first-party stuff on the service, it would probably appeal to a lot of people.
Maybe Microsoft should buy Activision? Is that a thing?
Not into Sub models nor Act/Bliz games so no to both
And this is why MS are buying publishers.
It's not a sure thing that we'll see price drops to $250 or $200. Microsoft has warned that the path to significant price reductions isn't there this generation, which is why they created the Series S in the first place (the lack of a path to significant price reductions for the Series X). Inflation that's higher than we've seen in decades won't help either. I think we will see bundle deals, but we may not see significant price drops.
Yes, but $50 after 1.5 years isn't much. If they drop $100 every 3 years then it'll be a pricey generation. But that's unlikely to happen as they were sold at a loss at first, and t hey probably want to hold the line on price as long as they can to make that up, and there's a habit of trying to sell consoles at a profit late in a generation, and all of that works against even as much as $100 per 3 years in price drops. From what I understand, the PS5 Digital may still being sold at a loss at this time, despite the lack of price drops yet.
I'm curious on what basis you predict such steep discounts, when Microsoft was warning not to expect to see such steep discounts even before we started seeing such high rates of inflation?
Another interpretation of everything you've said:
These are all good reasons for Microsoft to release more and better Series S bundles, perhaps with first-party games, or x-number of months of Game Pass, or other add-ons that cost Microsoft very little to include but significantly increase the value to the consumer.
This was Microsoft's approach during the Xbox 360 era, where the pricing changed infrequently, but the bundles changed (and became more generous over time) extremely frequently. They started with systems that had your choice of no hard drive or a 20 GB HDD, and by the end they had systems shipping with 250 GB HDDs as well as games, among other improvements (they added WiFi, HDMI, and more).
Microsoft went a very long time without lowering the price of their Xbox 360 SKUs, and part of how they did that was regularly adding value at the same price. And that was in a low inflationary environment. High inflation makes it arguably even more likely that Microsoft takes that tack with the Xbox Series systems, IMO.
Then there are the persistent rumours that Microsoft intends to release an improved Series S. Various rumours have it being perhaps somewhat more powerful, or having an optical drive, or not coming out at all... but these rumours might be reflective of Microsoft acknowledging that Series S stock is building up and considering hardware upgrades rather than price drops.
All that said, perhaps they will drop prices exactly as you say. But I don't think it's inevitable.
A) Unless I'm darshing up the math... which I may be, as I'm not perfect... but at 8% a year for four years I get a compounded 47% increase in price, which is equivalent to an effective 32% price reduction, is it not?
B) it's by no means a sure thing that we'll see 8% a year for the next four years.
C) My point wasn't about effective price reduction, my point was countering the narrative that we'll see ACTUAL price reductions down to $250 or $200, despite inflationary pressure. Your point about inflation therefore strengthens my argument, rather than weakening it.
