According to the statements of Phil Spencer, figures in support, the Game Pass is a clear success for Microsoft.
The PC Game Pass, on the other hand, seems to be more to thank than its console version.
The Game Pass is already profitable
The boss of Microsoft’s gaming branch, Phil Spencer, obviously wanted to talk to the wall street journal. As part of the Tech Live conference, the man spoke in particular about Game Pass, the firm’s video game subscription offer. Not content with providing figures, he was also quite honest in his remarks.
” The Game Pass as an overall part of our content and service revenue [de la branche Xbox, NDLR] is probably 15%,” says Spencer, before adding: “ I don’t think it gets any bigger than that. He thus indicates that in the future subscriptions will not represent 50-70 percent of revenues and will simply remain a reasonable part of a growing overall revenue.
The PC and the cloud are popular
This percentage, despite everything, is not negligible currently seems to be allowed by the PC version of the Game Pass. Spencer says: We’re seeing incredible growth on PC… On console, I’ve seen the growth slow down, mostly because at some point you’ve reached all the console players who want to subscribe. Specifically, year-over-year, the PC Game Pass subscription rate soared 159%.
Microsoft also just announced that more than 20 million people have used Xbox Cloud Gaming to play video games, up from 10 million earlier in the year. This popularity of the cloud should continue to climb, especially since Microsoft is investing heavily to develop the solution further, especially on mobile.
The Redmond firm does not forget Android and iOS.
” If you’re betting on the long term, which we’re doing, that we’ll be able to reach gamers on the biggest platforms where people play – Android and iOS smartphones – we want to be in a position with content , players, and showcase abilities to take advantage of. »
Spencer talks here unsurprisingly about the work in progress around a mobile store dedicated to video games to compete with Google and Apple.
Soon price increases at Xbox?
Finally, regarding the pricing of its services and consoles – in an environment where much of the competition has followed inflation – Spencer says:
” We held our prices on our consoles, we held our prices on games and our subscriptions. I don’t think we can do this forever. I think at some point we’re going to have to raise some prices on some things. But heading into the holiday season we felt it was very important to maintain our prices. »
It is therefore very likely that in a few months the prices of video games at Microsoft will rise. If the cost of Game Pass were to increase, perhaps the expected Game Pass family offer could partially compensate.
Source : The Verge
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