According to a famous phrase, we don’t seem to be twenty years old every day. But while many gamers remembered the release of the very first Xbox in the past few days, Microsoft is taking advantage of this milestone to make a harrowing revelation.
So it’s been two decades since Microsoft launched an attack on the home console market with a particular Xbox of the name. And if the previous generation shouldn’t have been easy, on the contrary, the American brand will have once again blown up the (good) old model of traditional sales with the launch of the Xbox Game Pass in June 2017 with the well-known success.
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While it is still unclear which CEO of Microsoft or Take-Two Interactive comes closest to the current portfolio of actual Microsoft subscribers, Xbox industry thinker Phil Spencer took the opportunity to interview the UK edition GQ, and indulge in such amazing confessions. After Spencer conjured up the famous “cheat syndrome” that might have existed when he assumed the post of Don Mattrick in 2014, Spencer finally turns the floor over to Sarah Bond, director of the overall video game ecosystem at Microsoft.
And just the latter lets go. The Xbox Game Pass, which has been pregnant since 2013, could have taken an entirely different form:
Codenamed Arches, Game Pass started out as a video game rental company, but the team preferred to choose a subscription model as services like Netflix or Spotify began to proliferate. The idea was to find an answer to the rapid decline in sales of a game: 75% of the revenue was generated in the first two months of marketing. Today they are spread over more than two years.
The road was long and full of pitfalls
Despite statements by Aaron Greenberg, who stated last year that the Game Pass would only be profitable in the long term, Microsoft would have found “its” way to secure more sustainable income. But as you can imagine, the idea didn’t go down well with industry players:
The company’s representatives wanted to talk to the various publishers about it, but met with a lot of resistance: “In no case will the Game Pass contribute to devaluing our games!”. We then suggested experimenting with their old titles as they were less of a risk. The response from the players exceeded all of our expectations.
Finally, Microsoft decided to have its first-party games direct to Game Pass on the day they were released. Sea of Thieves was the first to take the plunge, and it made the company unique. On Nintendo or Sony consoles, players still have to spend 60 dollars on a new game.
The rest, you know it: after a running-in period, the subscription will finally start with a first volley of a hundred titles at the end of spring 2017, before it goes back in many forms, such as the Game Pass Ultimate and other games, Pass for PC. Earlier this year, Phil Spencer even referred to it as an accelerator that would allow some missing licenses to be returned …
