Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.
MS is making money from Gamepass
Have they paid off the 70 billion? If they are making money, why are they firing people and cancelling projects?
Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They’re firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.
They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there’s a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that’s at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that’s revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they’ve built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.
MS may not have invented it (although I’d argue they essentially did) but they did perfect it. That was the whole idea behind windows and IE, market share dominance at any cost.
We call it the Walmart model
This has been so obvious from the beginning, and now that it’s too late is when they starting to complain.
Gamepass is going to continue betting worse until we end up with the mess that are streaming services right now.
I sincerely hope it fails.
Exactly. Right now developers get good deals when adding their games to game pass and the game pass is pretty cheap, but after game passes become “the thing” and developers have to be in a game pass, it will get worse for developers and consumers.
It has plateaued some time ago now. That’s not failure, but it’s not about to become Netflix either.
deleted by creator
- Publishers. They always get their buck.
Studios get gobbled up, mass layoff, explode and reform month by month.
-
Game engines. Nobody is going to even try to reinvent that wheel. Unreal and Unity make a fuckton of cash whether a game does or not. Yeah I hear you, but but but they have income limits, studios release one good ish title, they’re expected to pay like it’ll always happen.
-
Stores. At least until recently there was not even a slight challenge against the stores control. Now with Apple versus Epic, everybody’s dying to funnel people into their own payment system, But honestly, stores are still making all the money, there’s still the primary method of advertising that works and they still hold all the cards for making sure you show up in their “searches”.
If you manage to bottle lightning the studio makes a fuck ton of money, assuming you haven’t already sold your soul to venture capital. (Hint, If it’s more than two guys in a garage, they’ve already all sold their sole adventure capital)
On 2) Godot has entered the chat.
They really need to. I haven’t looked at them in quite a while now last time I looked I was hoping to move some Unity stuff over there, But it seem like anything other than Android was a significant hurdle.
I am subscribed here on Lemmy and they seem to be progressing quite a bit. I am not a game dev myself, but I have some ideas I have been contemplating dabbling in on there.
Looked them up. they JUST released something promising for IOS
https://christianselig.com/2025/05/godot-ios-interop/
You still need a lot of third-party help to get on a console, though.
Mobile gacha shit
Is it as bad as the time Netflix killed the movie industry?
The movie industry is plenty capable of killing itself.
I love renting games. Worked for me at block buster 🤷♂️.
Game pass might be the best deal in gaming, but you are selling your soul to the devil for it. It will ultimately harm gaming, especially developers long term. We should reject game pass.
Wow, I totally missed the part where Microsoft had a gun to your head. Obviously sales go down when people don’t have to buy the game to play it.
Why does Arkane suck so much now?
The funniest thing is that I can guarantee that whatever numbers Deathloop did they would have been much worse without Gamepass. Great game, but not the kind of game that can have mass appeal.
Wow, I totally missed the part where Microsoft had a gun to your head.
Yes. Microsoft is good at hiding that part until it’s too late to do much about it.
Arkane sucks now because MSFT forced them to make the kind of game they did not have experience in making.
It’s like hiring a plumber to fix your electrical problems, hiring a car mechanic to diagnose your skin condition.
This is the whole thing of large publishers buying out successful dev teams, then mismanaging the fuck out of them, then destroying them, by firing 1/4 of the staff, throwing another 1/4 all around their various other studios, then hiring a bunch of contractors for the remaining dev team to babysit / onboard for 6 months before they know how to do anything useful…
…all for a game that’s either a castrated, mutated version of what the studio is known for, of course with latest trending corpo buzzwords a ‘core features’, or is just something wildly different from the studio’s previous work.
This happens with extreme regularity in the history of the video game industry.
Almost like being rich is more likely to indicate someone is a pompous buffoon that takes credit for other people’s successes and blames other people for their own failures, than it is to indicate they are some kind of Ayn Rand style entrepreneurial ubermensch, mr ‘gonzo- rand 19’.
Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don’t care.
Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it’s so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won’t or can’t think ahead
What’s “short” about the short-sightedness, though? I’ve been a Game Pass subscriber for something like 8 years and it’s still crushing it as far as services go - probably moreso now than any year prior.
Will it last / remain a good deal forever? Nope. But nothing does/is. Might as well enjoy the great variety of games I’d never purchase (like Blue Prince, Arcade Paradise, Shipbreaker, South of Midnight, Expedition 33, etc.) along with the convenience of access to games I totally would pay for (like THPS 1+2, Gears, Diablo, etc.). Plus the built-in rewards subsidize like 1/4 of the cost.
When (not “if”, when) they jack up the price to a point that’s not worth the games or I don’t have enough time to play to justify the spend, I’ll just cancel.
i get the feeling gamepass gives you access to the library of games that my library has. fantastic if your library doesn’t have video games or you have difficulty getting out of the house, but i love my local library
What’s “short” about the short-sightedness, though?
Gamepass attacks the developers, not the consumers.
If you had been buying games you’d have a library 🤷
Absolutely. Every indicator available suggests Enshittification will hit the subscription models within the next few years.
I thought subscriptions were enshittification, you mean it gets even worse?
Riding the subsidized waves until the point of enshittification and then dumping it faster than a hot turd is what makes the shareholder cry
Just be careful that irrecoverable damage hasn’t been dealt to the game industry and traditional distribution methods by the point that the enshittification starts. What I’m really concerned about is that Microsoft will do everything in their power to smash the current games industry to bits and then rule the ashes. The games industry will end up smaller and worse off, but Microsoft still makes more money since they control a larger share even if the pie shrinks and shrivels.
Game pass is awesome. Played a fuck ton of games at that price. Hope it stays forever, especially with that stacking model lol.
Hope it stays forever
Oh boy, have I got some news for you
I know, I know lmfao. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to leach the hell out of this until it goes away.
Hey, uh, is Uber still cheaper than a taxi?
Oh, no, it isn’t, and also taxis, largely don’t exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the ‘consumer’ option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.
Roughly the same business model there.
You’re trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.
You definitely have a point… if US was the only country in the world and Uber did not provide a much better service than our local taxis. I mean yeah the local ones are cheaper but considering overall service, fuck no.
For me, one of the major advantages of Game Pass is publishers are absolutely refusing to put local regional pricing nowadays. Games at 60$+ cannot be bought by anyone with middle class salaries. Now with push to 70-80 usd+ for AAA, even AA games getting to 60$ it is impossible to buy in my country.
So why should I get a single game at those prices when I can get few hundred at similar pricing? It’s MSs problem that they are willing to put their games day 1 on GP not mine. I don’t care whether games are getting “devalued” or whatever, I’m simply getting what I paid for.
Also, people do tend to buy games standalone and I really can’t see that going away honestly. I can’t see games ever going subscription only or anything like that.
You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.
As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few ‘smaller’, though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, ‘satellite’ campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.
…
I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I’d say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.
Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?
Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.
MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a ‘console maker’, and moving toward ‘we are an uber publisher’.
…
But anyway… I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass…
The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.
It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don’t know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don’t sell as well.
…
Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:
If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service…
… eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart… and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren’t any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.
Game pass is good for one month and playing like 3 single player games. But it’s really been the final nail, last gasp whatever you want to call it for XBOX. Its not sustainable, has stalled out and larger developers have had enough of getting f**** over.
Honestly who cares. Stop buying AAA slop and support indies.
Only open-sourced, homebrewed, and single-person is what we need!
10 people or less.
Captain of Industry is a gem with a 4 person team Risk of Rain was 2, expanded to 3
That’s still at a human scale.
Hedon, Cultic, Zortch I think were all solo devs.
It stopped being just $1 and instantly became the worst thing ever. /s
Isn’t this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.
Of Microsoft? That’s like business 101 my dude, and mostly why business schools should be burned to the ground. The system we have stifles innovation and promotes greed. We fucked.
Except now it’s just spyware
It is classic tech company strategy.
We saw it with Amazon offering suspicious deals for years on name brand stuff to kill competitors. Uber offering subsidized rides to kill taxis. Google Photos offering unlimited free storage
If it seems too good to be true, check under your feet and see if there’s a rug there.
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn’t as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn’t killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the “wait for a sale” people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that’s a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
I thought that was during Covid.
I’m honestly surprised that movie theaters even exist still. Motion picture groups basically starve the theaters to the point where they can only survive off of concessions. The places are almost universally dirty and understaffed. Most of the mom and pop shops died off decades ago.
According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.
Lots of others did it during covid though.
The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.
We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn’t all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5…
And as an industry they return less than the sp500 so not only is movie viewing horrible, movie making is a terrible investment .
