They should close the loophole immediately and use sane marketing promos to get people to sign up instead, is my point.
But yes of course they’ll lock it down and increase prices once they hit their critical mass of subscribers. Like I said earlier in the thread, we’ll look back at 2022 as the golden year of Game Pass.
I understood that reference!
I think we need a secret handshake for those that use the loophole. Maybe airport lounge access.
Thraeg
3230
Yeah, I figured the XBL conversion was too good to last, so I did the max three years. If I knew it would stick around this long, I would have just done one year at a time, but oh well. I’ve been extending using Black Friday discounts the last couple of years to extend for a year at a time for ~$7.50/month, which is still a pretty great deal.
I still expect it to stop working every single day, like I said earlier it’s kinda amazing it’s still doable.
Maybe it’s their stealth way of measuring who the really hardcore Xbox gamers are? The only way you’d know about it is if you read one of these nerd forums or look up old articles on gaming sites.
Dejin
3233
I purchased a bunch of “3 Months of Game Pass Ultimate” electronic codes for $22.88 each from Walmart last year during Black Friday sales (I think someone on Qt3 alerted us that they were there, can’t remember who, but thanks!).
Hopefully that will be an annual thing. It’s not the amazing deal that the whole “convert from XBLV” is, but I think around $7.60 a month is still a great deal for Game Pass Ultimate.
That’s a pretty good deal, it’s half off.
How do we factor in all these “two weeks of GPU for $1.35” keys on places like eneba.com? I mean, presumably those are gray market (if not outright stolen), but Microsoft doesn’t seem to take any action against using them or selling them, so presumably they’re resigned to their use.
I did a couple months of those to top off my 3 years, worked fine. Would be a huge pain in the ass to do it 72 times though.
Timex
3237
One advantage, for MS, of the shady XBLG deal, is the nature of it being so shady specifically incentivized me to buy 3 years of time back in October of 2020, because I assumed that the deal was gonna stop being possible any day. So they got me on the hook for 3 full years, right off the bat.
Of course, the downside for MS is that I only gave them $180 and I’m not gonna pay them any more until 2023.
There’s no way Game Pass is making money at $4/month. $8/month, maybe. $15/month probably, but it’s tight.
Dejin
3239
Sure but their costs don’t go up very much per user, so I assume that’s what they’re pushing for. If it could be making money right now at $15/month then if they double the number of subscribers then it’ll make money at $7.50/month. And if it really takes off, then they’re printing cash. I think that’s pretty clearly the way they’re thinking about this.
It’s not like Microsoft is short on cash, so they can give it a long time frame to give it to get to the printing cash stage.
I would assume their costs are entirely tied to users, as they need to pay license holders for each game. But perhaps that only counts when a user installs the game, or plays it, or the number of hours they play as a proportion of the total. We really don’t know what those contracts look like.
To put it in perspective, my favorite weather app, Carrot, charges up to $10/month to subscribe. For this cost you can select weather sources, put a widget on your apple watch, and get notifications for upcoming thunderstorms. That’s $10/month. Now I think that’s crazy overpriced and would never subscribe to an app in a million years, but that’s what one company will give you for ten bucks.
Game pass with the loophole is 42% of that. The value proposition is extreme.
We know a little bit, mainly that there are all kinds of contracts based on whatever they need it to be.
Our deals are, I’ll say, all over the place. That sounds unmanaged, but it’s really based on the developer’s need. One of the things that’s been cool to see is a developer, usually a smaller to mid-sized developer, might be starting a game and say, “hey, we’re willing to put this in Game Pass on our launch day if you guys will give us X dollars now.” What we can go do is, we’ll create a floor for them in terms of the success of their game. They know they’re going to get this return.
[In] certain cases, we’ll pay for the full production cost of the game. Then they get all the retail opportunity on top of Game Pass. They can go sell it on PlayStation, on Steam, and on Xbox, and on Switch. For them, they’ve protected themselves from any downside risk. The game is going to get made. Then they have all the retail upside, we have the opportunity for day and date. That would be a flat fee payment to a developer. Sometimes the developer’s more done with the game and it’s more just a transaction of, “Hey, we’ll put it in Game Pass if you’ll pay us this amount of money.”
Others want [agreements] more based on usage and monetization in whether it’s a store monetization that gets created through transactions, or usage. We’re open [to] experimenting with many different partners, because we don’t think we have it figured out. When we started, we had a model that was all based on usage. Most of the partners said, “Yeah, yeah, we understand that, but we don’t believe it, so just give us the money upfront.”
Wow. That’s what it looks like when an executive is given a gigantic pile of money and told to do whatever it takes to get subscriptions.
Can’t find an Xbox Series console?
You’ll be able to play Xbox Series games on your Xbone.
It’s buried in this blog post. But xCloud coming to Xbox One.
stusser
3245
Certainly makes sense to me!
That’s literally the first thing that’s made cloud gaming interesting to me. Not that there are going to be any Series exclusives I want to play any time soon.
