Microsoft Acquisitions, GamePass and GaaS

[hypnology]

If you follow any gaming news at all you probably heard by now Microsoft is buying up a lot of game developers. Most recently Activision-Blizzard.

 

A lot of the conversation I see online is your classic console war talk, Xbox vs Playstation.

I think these people are missing the point completely, Microsoft has no interest in killing Playstation. They want Sony to embrace GamePass, and to push xCloud and GamePass to the forefront of gaming.

Look at Forza Horizon 3 if you want a glimpse of the future Microsoft wants. A pure service based game, taken off store shelves because they don't want you to play old games, only the new. FH3 was cracked by pirates, but even that isn't available anymore unless you get a specific version of windows 10 (and tinker with it to stop it from auto-updating). The only way to play FH3 now is if you get a key or already own it. That's why they don't want you to own games, to make it as tedious as possible to play older titles that no longer generate income.

 

And it's only going to keep getting worse. I see a lot of people both in my friend group and the wider internet that think they're sticking it to Microsoft by abusing $1 GamePass trials, or the Pringles "exploit" to get free GamePass. But they fail to understand that Microsoft is more than aware of these things, how could they not be? It's the way every company operates now. Grow your userbase at a loss, then when you're the monopoly and what the mainstream is used to, slowly raise the prices. Look at Netflix for an example, they just this week announced to raise their price with a dollar, again.

[kerdios]

You forgot King (the company that makes candy crush). It's part of the blizzard activision model and probably gets as much income for the least amount of development time from casual gaming

Edited January 19, 2022 by kerdios (see edit history)

[hypnology]

On 1/19/2022 at 12:14 AM, kerdios said:

You forgot King. It's part of the blizzard activision model and probably gets as much income for the least amount of development time from casual gaming

Oh yeah absolutely, Activision-Blizzard makes a boatload of revenue, I'm not disputing that's a big part of the motivation and they will very likely make their money back in time. It all comes down to money in the end, GaaS as well.