Is Xbox Being Phased Out? The Future of Microsoft Gaming

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[@CharityDiary]

Neither Microsoft Gaming nor Xbox will exist in 10 years. It's all about Game Pass. The plan has always been for Game Pass to be a loss leader, eventually growing so big that it can be put on PC, mobile, and PlayStation, then cutting back on the catalog and raising prices to stop profit bleed. This is Microsoft's exit strategy from the hardware and games marketplaces, and afterward they will exist solely as Game Pass on everyone else's hardware. They've always maintained that "Game Pass is profitable", but I think they're manipulating the data there. They're probably just not accounting for the cost of GP deals and acquisitions, which are likely categorized under brand investment and not Game Pass operating costs. But the plan with GP has never been to make money, but rather to put Xbox six feet under.

[@Mr.HunterXx]

Xbox sucks, I’m selling mine asap.

[@MLennholm]

In order to claim that Game Pass is profitable they also most certainly do not account for cloud gaming being part the Ultimate package, which is way to cheap to sustain a service like that (I guess since they call it _beta_ they can disregard it in the RoI calculations). Every single player on cloud gaming is essentially leasing a dedicated high-end gaming rig, it's not like a Netflix or Spotify where it only has to serve static files through a CDN. I've always said that a game streaming subscription service would need a monthly fee of at least $50 to have any chance at being profitable, and how many consumers would be willing to pay that? Google knew this, which is why they tried a different approach of charging full price for each game instead but as we know that was a complete failure.

[@snoookie456]

These huge companies are so out of touch and are not seeing the consumer's experience, all they care about is the numbers on a screen. PC gaming used to be preferred by many because PCs are affordable and mods are a thing (piracy also, I guess). Now that PCs have gone incredibly expensive, console is weirdly the cheaper option for people who just want to game instead of do all the other countless stuff that a PC can do and constantly worry about having to upgrade some component once every year or two. When I used to work at a convenience store we used to have an interesting price range. A cup of coffee - 20 cents. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label - 200 bucks. And my boss was clever enough to know that one of them was the money maker and the other was there just for the prestige. These CEOs however aren't as clever as my boss and they burn you on the coffee because they keep hoping you're gonna eventually buy the Blue Label if they get rid of all of the other stuff that they used just to hook you. Currently they have the perfect opportunity to do the thing they've always been doing and rely on exclusivity at a price that is cheaper than PC nowadays. But no. They're gonna miss that opportunity and shoot themselves in the foot by trying to push their "exclusives" literally anywhere. That is the dumbest move possible, even if they did manage to pull it off (which they didn't, they are crashing and burning right now). And the subscription model is to blame of course. It used to be PC vs console. Now it's anything goes, as long as it is SUBSCRIPTION-BASED. So when they realize they can't sell you the Blue Label, they're gonna try to backpedal and rent it out to you, thus completely devaluing it. After a decade or two of a golden age for video games, corporations have finally managed to carefully construct the worst and most evil possible scenario for the industry. And this is predictably a failure for the vidya industry, just like it ruined the music industry, just like it ruined Hollywood and just like it ruined TV... but as long as these corporate asshats are focused on the numbers on the screen, they're gonna be stuck in their insanity loop that Vaas warned us about in Far Cry 3.

[@fabiorossi8]

Let me upgrade my console as if it were a PC but as a console is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard, if you upgrade it stops being a console and becomes a PC.