Microsoft ei ole saanut myytyä Xbox Series X (ja S) -konsoleita siinä määrin kuin olisi itse toivonut. Niin ikään Xbox Game Passin kasvu on hidastunut verrattuna siihen, mitä ennustettiin ja toivottiin. Microsoftin pelibisnes ei kuitenkaan ole menossa mihinkään.
Analyytikko Michael Pachter on vankasti sitä mieltä, ettei Microsoft ole hävinnyt Sonylle niin sanotussa konsolisodassa. Hänen mukaansa Xboxin häviäjiksi julistavilla on asiaan väärä näkökulma.
Toinen asia on tietenkin se, onko analyytikko oikeassa.
"I think the whole development and promotion of Game Pass was always an acknowledgment that the Xbox is a platform and not necessarily a device you need. I think that Microsoft will be perfectly happy in a future where there are no consoles and everybody has a dumb terminal attached to the Internet, to the cloud, and they stream all their games.
Game Pass, that's their long long game, and I think Microsoft recognized very early on in this cycle that the future is the cloud and that if you don't have to sell a console your addressable Market goes from 200, 250, 300 million people who own consoles to 3 or 4 billion people who play games. That's their endgame, much like Netflix said 'how many people watch TV?' and the answer is 4 or 5 billion, so Netflix has 260 million now.
I think that they, Satya Nadella being the architect and Phil Spencer being the field general executing the strategy, I think they're trying to get 250 million Game Pass subscribers without a console.
Is there anything Microsoft can do to regain ground this generation? Sure, cancel Game Pass and cut the price of the Xbox. If they did that, if Xbox is 200 bucks and they told every Game Pass member we'll give you an Xbox for 20 bucks because you've already paid for Game Pass, and by the way, if you buy Xbox you get all of our first-party releases free, they would pass Sony like they were standing still. They would just lose money, but they would do it. If Microsoft wanted to win the generation, they would win the generation.
That is not what they're trying to do. They're trying to win the game's business by offering games to 3 billion people, not to 300 million people. That's their endgame and to be honest with you, the way Game Pass is going to work is the price will drop from 15 bucks a month to 10 and then it'll drop to 5 with ad support. Every time you load up a game, you're going to be required to watch an ad.
People will tough that out and Microsoft's going to make a ton of money. More people are going to play games and they're going to pay less for the privilege, so I think they win. They just don't win the console generation.
Now they have all that other content. You're going to get Hellblade 2, you're going to get The Outer Worlds 2, you're going to get Elder Scrolls 6 one of these days, you're going to get the entire Call of Duty catalog, you're going to get World of Warcraft as a part of Game Pass. Yes, they will go to 200 million subscribers, so I think that they're absolutely executing brilliantly.
I think the gamer perception that they lost to Sony is just wrong. They lost in the console battle. If that's how you measure your worth, that you've got to sell more consoles or you suck, great. If the question is who's going to be more profitable, Microsoft, by 10x or 100x."