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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

I don't play games at all so I'm very out of the loop but gamepass was a failure?

I have friends at Microsoft who worked on it and they all seemed to think it was going well last I checked (about a year ago).

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> gamepass was a failure?

I'm amazed that this is a question. Gamepass is essentially so low cost as to be an incredibly costly giveaway, only it has proven that this devalues everything that touches it.

For context, Hifi Rush had 3 million players on Gamepass last August, and today they shut the studio. So even when they get a break out hit they cannot justify keeping the studios around to try and do another; that's not a success.

Until I see actual numbers on Gamepass I won’t believe that it was a failure. It isn’t a direct comparison of “gamers are spending $10 instead of $70”. People who would not buy a game that just came out will willingly pay for Gamepass every month. Gamepass also exists on PC, so Xbox is dipping into a user base which otherwise might not buy many products from them. Yes they almost definitely make less money from some people, but they might make that back and more from people who otherwise would not be buying their games. It’s hard to use your intuition here without some numbers

And yet here we are where a fantastically successful mid budget game published on to gamepass by a first party studio leading to huge excitement in gamepass is not enough to justify the continued existence of the studio which produced it.

It's way too soon to call it a failure, but I'd be very surprised if GP isn't a loss leader strategy for Microsoft to capture the game subscription market.

The problem is that this is a very 2010's strategy and money is no longer free. So this approach is a lot riskier than it was than in the netflix days. I don't know if Microsoft, given this news, wants to keep playing the long game.

Game pass was an obvious piece of gamer bait.

It is current high value for consumers, but that’s all it is, and in cases where MA is just a third party vendor to the publishers, high value for consumers is bad for the publishers. If it is ever deemed a success, that value will diminish extremely fast.

>they all seemed to think it was going well last I checked

...based on what?

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