Xbox Game Pass Causes Every Game Launching on the Service to Badly Miss Its Sales Goals

09.05.2024 - 16:46 / wccftech.com / Francesco De Meo

The major focus placed on the Xbox Game Pass may be a much bigger problem than most anticipated, as it is one of the reasons why Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin were closed down, according to a former Xbox employee.

In a new post shared on LinkedIn, Brad Hilderbrand, who has been the Senior Public Relations Manager for 343 Industries, The Coalition, Compulsion Games, and others up until this month, highlighted how big of a problem the subscription service is. Every game that launches on the service badly misses its sales goals. This is accounted attributing parts of revenue to top-performing Game Pass games every month, but this doesn't exactly solve the problem, as most games don't stay at the top of the chart for more than a month or two. This is also made worse by the subscriber count, which is not increasing as much as it was in the past. As such, the amount of revenue it's attributing to games isn't keeping up with budgets.

Related Story Microsoft Still Evaluating Whether to Put CoD on Game Pass (and a Game Pass Price Increase), Hellblade II PS5

Xbox Game Pass staying like this wouldn't have been a problem if Xbox didn't go on its acquisition spree. Up until three or four years ago, the division was basically a rounding error on Microsoft's books, as it made some money and didn't cost that much, so other parts of the business made up for it. But after purchasing Bethesda and Activision, the "Eye of Sauron" has turned, and Xbox is expected to make the $70 billion spent to purchase the Call of Duty publisher back or cut expenses as much as possible while they attempt to.

According to Brad Hilderbrand, this creates an impossible problem to solve with Xbox Game Pass. The games that were supposed to drive new subscriptions, like Redfall and Starfield, failed to do so, and there isn't any game on the horizon capable of doing so, with the exception of Call of Duty. At the same time, putting the new entry in the series on Xbox Game Pass on day one puts the guaranteed revenue at risk. So, whether it is decided to put the game on the service from day one or not, Xbox will either continue to lose face for backtracking on promises or will lose money. At the end of the day, Brad Hilderbrand concluded, Call of Duty and other huge IPs will be fine, but smaller studios will suffer the blow because no matter how good, they will never be able to make enough money to make up for the $70 billion hole that Xbox has to dig itself out.

With uncertainty regarding their future, the closing of beloved development studios, and games launching in a bad state, Xbox is definitely facing some of its hardest challenges. No matter how the company decides to proceed, it's certain that the Xbox Game Pass service will have to