Hacker News Reader

Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

> Game Pass has been, in my opinion, and those of almost every gamer I know, incredibly good value for the money.

it's a subsidised introductory price to capture market share and kill off the competition with the hope of creating a monopoly ("predatory pricing")

View on HN

Apparently it was profitable (not subsidized), not sure if true.

https://www.gamesradar.com/platforms/xbox-series-x/xbox-pres...

depends entirely how you attribute the game revenue

this price rise was driven by them fearing cannibalisation of game sale revenues for the imminent new call of duty release

last year just on CoD they gave up $300 million (due to gamepass)

https://archive.is/ic79u

And over 82% of the copies sold were on PlayStation.

Seems MS bet on GamePass + all the publishers acquisitions moving lots of units of Xbox hardware but that simply did not happen, so now they pivoted to be the biggest 3rd party publisher and are releasing everything on all the other consoles, even their own original Xbox Studios games like Forza, Flight Simulator, Gears of War, etc.

I thought common wisdom was that console hardware was sold at low profit to generate software-based revenue?

If that's true, then selling software at low profit to sell hardware at low profit to sell software at high profit seems convoluted.

That's specifically Game Pass being profitable. It conveniently leaves out the long-term viability of whole supply chain profitability.

Whether the developers lose money as a result of the deal is extraordinarily hard to calculate and Microsoft doesn't disclose.

I guess that depends on how they measure its profitability.

If it's services costs and 3rd party deals probably. But if you include the costs of all their 1st party games included day and date it's likely not, specially since they acquired Bethesda and Activision Blizzard.

A hint of that is that they are now releasing even their exclusive Xbox games now on PS and Switch 1/2.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com