Comment on Xbox Series X and S: Microsoft Has Reportedly Sold Less Than 30 Million Consoles This Generation

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bassomitron@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Rather, it isn’t sustainable at its current pricing model. It takes the average studio team 3-5 years to make 1 AAA game.

Microsoft’s internal studios (excluding the ones they just bought over the last 4-5 years) have made Halo Infinite and… Hmm… Is the Forza studio considered OG first-party? I’ll just lump them in as well, since they’ve been associated with MS for awhile. So 2 major games in the last ~8 years. Then you have the major studios they just bought: Bethesda and Blizzard/Activision. Bethesda has released 2 major AAA games in the last 5 years while under MS ownership (I think Doom Eternal came out before the purchase). Blizzard has done 1 and Activision has done 1 CoD game.

So MS paid $7.5b for Zenimax/Bethesda and $68.7b for Blizz/Activision, for a whopping total of $76.2b. Starfield sold around 3m copies, Diablo 4 has generated around $1b in revenue since release (chose revenue since it’s a live service game and that includes copies sold), and Black Ops 6 has sold… I’m not sure, a quick search doesn’t show any hard numbers, just Xbox propaganda that it “was the biggest release in franchise history.” (I say propaganda bc many of their larger shareholders weren’t super pleased with how much it cost to purchase Activision, so of course they wanted to spin it as being a smart investment).

And it costs MS a lot of money to license some of the bigger games to come to GamePass.

I just don’t see it being sustainable without cost increases. And if the cost goes up, they’ll turn off customers. And we’ve already seen that their cheaper, indie studios aren’t safe from being axed despite releasing successful hits.

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