I have a conspiracy theory here: They raised the price that high, knowing it is too high, just to lower it again. Why would they do it? To have an excuse to remove Call of Duty from Game Pass.
I think it’s even simpler than that; to find out what the maximum people really will pay is. The price has gone down, but not to what it was before. There’s still something like a 20% increase. If people go crawling back, MS has just figured out where the suckers are.
Yeah, that is also a strategy known to work: Increase 2 steps forward, “oh we hear you community”, step back 1 time, profit while looking like the good guy.
They wanna find the diehards, refocus around them.
Minimizing costs and maximizing returns is the literal specialty of the new head of Xbox. Data Analyst wonk, excelled at figuring how to max the profitability of online store fronts.
She has literally 0 experience with video games, which is good in the sense that she’s a pair of fresh eyes, but is bad in the sense that she has no real motivation or predisposition toward keeping anything old around just because it is the way things have been done.
Expect more, or at least more clever dark patterns.
MSFT is losing a fuck ton of money on all their AI investments, CoPilot being the biggest fuckup yet in their history, and their coziness with the US/NSA is basically losing them enterprise grade stuff in Europe.
They need to counterbalance this by turning other segments of their business into as profit-y profit centers as possible.
I still think medium term, they’re gonna end up as basically mostly a library of giant, big name IPs, that you most easily will be able to access through some kind of MSFT … Netflix but for Video Games, type of thing.
Its possible they keep making hardware beyond this last shot at a next gen … some kind of hardware.
But if the whole thing isn’t profitable enough to offset their losses everywhere else, I think they just drop down to minimal possible costs, and basically just become an IP dragon/gatekeeper.
Microsoft owns the company that makes Call of Duty so in order to make more money they would want people to buy the game each year instead of just having game pass. The big hope being that someone both buys COD and subscribes to GamePass.
They already have, with the price decrease. It’s official announced. Because selling Call of Duty is a huge deal and makes lot of money. The game is extremely expensive and they don’t want to miss out on the revenue. Unlike any of their other games.
I have a conspiracy theory here: They raised the price that high, knowing it is too high, just to lower it again. Why would they do it? To have an excuse to remove Call of Duty from Game Pass.
I think it’s even simpler than that; to find out what the maximum people really will pay is. The price has gone down, but not to what it was before. There’s still something like a 20% increase. If people go crawling back, MS has just figured out where the suckers are.
Yeah, that is also a strategy known to work: Increase 2 steps forward, “oh we hear you community”, step back 1 time, profit while looking like the good guy.
“We listened.”
No, you didn’t you jackals, you had to back down
If one idiot falls for that, it’s a profit for them
My theory is ‘culling’.
They wanna find the diehards, refocus around them.
Minimizing costs and maximizing returns is the literal specialty of the new head of Xbox. Data Analyst wonk, excelled at figuring how to max the profitability of online store fronts.
She has literally 0 experience with video games, which is good in the sense that she’s a pair of fresh eyes, but is bad in the sense that she has no real motivation or predisposition toward keeping anything old around just because it is the way things have been done.
Expect more, or at least more clever dark patterns.
MSFT is losing a fuck ton of money on all their AI investments, CoPilot being the biggest fuckup yet in their history, and their coziness with the US/NSA is basically losing them enterprise grade stuff in Europe.
They need to counterbalance this by turning other segments of their business into as profit-y profit centers as possible.
I still think medium term, they’re gonna end up as basically mostly a library of giant, big name IPs, that you most easily will be able to access through some kind of MSFT … Netflix but for Video Games, type of thing.
Its possible they keep making hardware beyond this last shot at a next gen … some kind of hardware.
But if the whole thing isn’t profitable enough to offset their losses everywhere else, I think they just drop down to minimal possible costs, and basically just become an IP dragon/gatekeeper.
Genuine question - why would they want to remove Call of Duty from game pass?
Microsoft owns the company that makes Call of Duty so in order to make more money they would want people to buy the game each year instead of just having game pass. The big hope being that someone both buys COD and subscribes to GamePass.
They already have, with the price decrease. It’s official announced. Because selling Call of Duty is a huge deal and makes lot of money. The game is extremely expensive and they don’t want to miss out on the revenue. Unlike any of their other games.