@Pedro said:
@osan0 said:
@Pedro: Oh i know. Not good for us humble consumers. Ideally MS would make better games, some more interesting gaming hardware, develop the services and have each live or die on it's own merits. Generally, industry wide, i'd prefer to see the content, hardware and services/sales business completely decoupled.
But, historically, the way to attract people to something, whether it's a console or a service, is content locked to a thing. Great games, well advertised that gets people excited. It's the only proven way to do it. Every successful platform holder did it. Those that failed, failed due to lacking exclusive compelling content. It's just the nature of the business.
But the nature of the business is changing. The only thing that isn't changing is the gamers wanting "good" games. A game doesn't need to be exclusive to successful, critically acclaimed or wanted by gamers just "good" or "compelling" as you stated.
" ": because it is subjective.
On a game not needing to be exclusive to be successful: Yes that's true of course. From our point of view, exclusive games are not inherently superior to multiplats. It makes no difference. There are many cases where current exclusives would be better if they were multiplat (looking at you Nintendo!). From our point of view it's better to keep everything multiplat. All the current consoles are functionally basically the same and the PC can also do a dam fine impression of a console when needed.
But you are not looking at this from corporate enough. This is SW Gods dammit!! :P
Historically the only successful way to build a platform has been exclusive content. Having the right content exclusive to your platform. Halo 2 showed MS that Xbox Live was onto something back in the day. Nintendo...all of it. Steam was just a patching service for counter strike before HL2 was released (which needed Steam to run, thus compelling loads of people to sign up). PS lived on it's exclusives and got battered during the PS3 era because 3rd parties went multiplat and Sony were not making many of their own games (a mistake they spent the gen setting right).
The thing is there is not a single example of a gaming platform I can think of that is successful simply because it exists. Anyone that tried that went bust.
200 million paying 15 quid a month (subject to change) year in year out. Circa 30 Billion a year in revenue at least. Lots of mindshare too. Lots of user data to sell. Lots of opportunities to upsell other services. That's what MSs top brass are looking at.
Yes: there is currently a cost of production problem for exclusives and, at the moment, MS and Sony are cracking under the pressure. Currently consoles can't support their own production costs. You have a service bringing in at least 30 billion+ a year: all of a sudden billion dollar productions don't look so scary.
But the only way Gamepass will see any rapid growth is if MS make better games and put them behind the paywall. By all means bring gamepass to every platform possible....but people need to subscribe to access them. That's how to grow the service.
The big difficulty, of course, is define "Make better games". As you say: it's subjective. That's the challenge for MS. The general consensus around MSs releases generally seems to be "meh" though. Sometimes they score well or make a good first impression....then the reaction changes to "oh....that's it". They are not landing hits at the moment. I hope that changes but, so far this gen, not a lot of positivity around MSs output. Making well loved, highly successful, mega selling hits is not an exact science (that's probably a good thing mind :P). But it's something MS needs to get better at.
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