Summon Sign, Episode 83 | 2025's Biggest Gaming News (So Far) (Video)
Added 2025-07-29 16:01:32 +0000 UTCFor your viewing pleasure.
Comments
Xbox also makes money selling third party games on their storefront and from selling their own games on other storefronts. That complicates the math more. I'm sure you could spin the numbers to make it look profitable or not profitable based on your agenda. But we do know their subscriber numbers are way lower than they wanted/needed them to be by now. The question is whether they would be making more or less money than if they never started Game Pass. I think they are obviously making less. You have all the people who drop in and out, often getting refunds or possibly paying up to $20 instead of $70. I argue they've also cultivated a very budget minded audience that has mostly stopped buying games and will just play what's available in Game Pass. So Xbox is not only losing money from not selling their own games, but they're losing tons of 30% rips from 3rd party games. Xbox has the smallest console audience and also the cheapest. That's not a good place to be. It's why they're selling on PS5 and they're trying to transition their console players into PC players.
Matthew Cooper
2025-07-30 18:48:08 +0000 UTCColin saying "just don't pre-order" - this got me thinking. What if everyone just stopped pre-ordering? Would the price of ALL games like instantly drop? I wonder how the publishers would react to that. pipe dream obviously. Pre-order makes 0 sense now days unless its a physical thing. but obv i'm in the minority here cuz pre-orders are a massive part of their business, apparently.
Guybrush Threepwood
2025-07-30 13:02:09 +0000 UTCColin’s point on Xbox / does not make any sense. Xbox doesn’t include first party dev costs in game pass financials, this is because it is not an expense of games pass, it’s an expense of each particular studio. Obviously putting first party games into games pass costs them sales which lowers turnover from that avenue. However. Xbox as a whole is profitable, so how can games pass not be profitable? Does Xbox have some other random avenue of revenue that nobody knows about making up this gap in sales? Obviously no. They make enough money from games pass and sales to be profitable. You can’t make the point that games pass cannibalises sales and then make the point games pass isn’t profitable - so long as Xbox is profitable then games pass must be aswell. Unless people believe Xbox are making many millions of games sales (they aren’t)
Sam
2025-07-30 11:37:48 +0000 UTC
