In the wake of the announcement of the takeover of Activision-Blizzard for almost 70 billion dollars, Microsoft also gave updated figures for Xbox Game Pass, the only sprain that the American manufacturer allows itself, which is so cautious when it comes to revealing the sales figures for its Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S, still taboo. To date, there are therefore no less than 25 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers, which is 7 million more than last year since Microsoft announced a figure of 18 million subscribers to its service. Success is therefore there, and Microsoft can finally bend its chest a little, knowing that all these takeovers of studios and publishers have the sole objective of strengthening the Xbox Game Pass catalog to consolidate its position as market leader. in this domain. Because we must not delude ourselves, for Microsoft, the battle is no longer in the sale of physical consoles (they cannot compete with Sony PlayStation), but in the adhesion of players to a dematerialized service, and is right.
As such, Phil Spencer (the boss of the Xbox brand) is lucid: the competition will end up adopting the same strategy, Sony the first, he who behind the scenes is preparing his version of the PlayStation Game Pass, wishing to merge PlayStation Now and PlayStation Plus. If this is information leaked from Bloomberg so far, nothing announces the availability of the biggest PlayStation Studios games in day one in the service, but Sony will unfortunately have to comply in order not to advance (and it is already the case) by Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass. At the microphone of IGN.com (translated by the French version of the site), Phil Spencer advances a little on the subject:
I don’t see that as validation. In fact, when I speak with the teams, I speak of inevitability. For us, it is necessary to continue to innovate, to be competitive, because there are things that we do that can be an advantage for this market today, but it is just based on the fact that we have done it first, not that we’ve created something no one else can do.
It’s better because it boosts our energy towards the next ideas that we should work on to continue building on what has been started before. Because I think the right way is to launch great games, to launch them on PC, on console, on the cloud, and to make them available D-Day with the subscription. And I think that’s what the competition is going to do.
If Microsoft obviously seems to be a step ahead of changes in consumption, we must not forget that physical purchases are still extremely strong for this generation: evidenced by the very good figures achieved by the PS5 in the midst of a pandemic. The same goes for Nintendo, which seems completely hermetic to the idea of switching to a Game Pass system, even if the Kyoto firm approached Microsoft a few years ago for partnerships and some exchanges of vouchers preceded . The future will tell…
