Xbox Game Pass Reportedly Drops To 30M Subscribers, But Has 'Started To Grow Again'

There must be a decent amount of PC gamepass subscriptions for the amount of subs.
Considering the series consoles have only sold a little over 30 million.

I do think it will continue to grow as decisions are made for cheaper and different tiers. I'm quite in favour of scrapping GPU and having premium as the defacto tier, but it's so hard for Xbox to walk back on day 1 games

The fact it's growing again shows that when you make the popular decisions and actually stick to them. It normally pays off.

I wonder how many people dropped out after the stacked GPU with the Gold conversion ran out. I was considering to cancel GPU, but since I still just pay 12,99€...

@Fiendish-Beaver I think she has to remove tentpole games from day 1. Early sales > engagement metrics

Considering COD got removed as a Day One title on GPU, I reckon all other Xbox exclusives will suffer the same fate.

It's not practical as a business to give away games Day One on a service.

This will put pressure on studios to deliver great games, since great games sell, and that's a net positive in my book.

Good news and there's some big Day One games coming up.
..
One thing I think they should do, make you play for cloud saves just as Sony do, No subscription No cloud saves.

I agree with you guys about GPU and exclusivity.

I don’t envy Sharma’s position. She needs to increase hardware sales, game pass subscribers and software sales.
Will exclusivity with their top games do this?
If game pass numbers don’t increase with an improved amount of exclusive games, do they remove them from day one to try and increase sales?

If they did remove day one games, I’d probably be happy just to wait the year until it arrives on game pass rather than buy them. That’s my plan with COD.

They really are in between a rock and a hard place to turn things around in my opinion.

I also agree they’ll be looking at E Days to decide where to go from here on out.

Yep because a few suites sat around in a meeting room but it was probable had tvs and a few gadgets so their cools as ***** dude & chicks so while they discuss future plans they activate Sparta mode and say ok so we will obvs have x number of cloud first gamers or console will sell well even though we just restricted this gen with a ***** series s.

Only reality hits these dude and chicks ain’t spatas, their just rich people who struggle to break egos to comprehend a rooms let alone read it.

So now everyone else must pay the price how about you just he salary of all the people who royally ***** up, hire someone worth while who understands gaming. Even the new one asks a question on social media then just blindly implements it lol. Xbox will not be the first billion dollar company to go bust for no reason other than rich suites and greedy shareholder.

@themightyant I often subscribe for one. Both then quit. Like that’s the point of single month subs and no discount on annuals, you can literally come and go one month Xbox go next ps extraz think maybe you just don’t switch things up enough lad. Also these stats kind of show otherwise, people are dropping!

@themightyant A few million must be interested considering the sub numbers it would be hard for the series consoles alone to reach that number.
Maybe a couple million could still be on last gen aswell still subscribed.

@themightyant it's a very good point, and no they have never said anything negative regarding game pass figures (not that they would), but I'm thinking along the lines of if they had to take new CODs away, then the same logic should apply to all high budget games

Something isn’t adding up.

When speculation arose that gamepass was hemorrhaging cancelled subscribers due to the price hike, people with connections in the industry painted a picture that it could have been in the ~10million+ range. Thus, operating under that assumption the expediency of Asha’s price drop is explained. Now we’re being told here they only lost about 4million-ish people? That’s bad, obviously, but not ‘call a board meeting and lynch the previous management’ bad.

So either this new circa ~4million figure isn’t accurate, or what gamepass needs to be in order to be profitable—or even to be worth keeping alive—is rapidly growing so far out of reach that they’re scrambling to keep the structure alive before the whole thing crumbles to pieces before our eyes.

I don't subscribe to GP myself (well, I do have the essential tier for online multiplayer that I only use in FFXIV). I want a game, I tend to buy it. I used to be subscribed when the cost were low enough that it did not bother me "wasting" most months of the year.

IMO, Premium is the best value subscription. Especially for a new customer that instantly gets access to a gigantic back catalog. I just wish they were more predictable. I think EAPlay puts all their games exactly 12 months after launch. GP Premium is "sometime within 12 months". Even if sometimes that is better, I would prefer predictability.

As for tiers, controversial take:
GPU price hike was itself not the problem, but it was very poorly thought out. The hike was aimed at the group of people that only subscribe for one or two months to play a big new title and then drop out. The smart solution would had been for GPU to go to 30 BUT offer a year option where the player commits to the 12 months for a decent discount that net no hike from the old model (20 a month).

For me, 20 is still to high to subscribe and forget, but I'm sure they would had faced fewer unsubscribers and continued growth. As it stands, they set themselves back several years on their growth goals.

@Fiendish-Beaver I agree. Big 1st party games will be removed as an option as soon as possible. I think e-day looks like it's going to be incredible, score high in reviews and play like a dream.

But I don't think it moves sub numbers

@MinervaX76 not offering GPU as an annual subscription is such a strange thing. That's where they work best, when they can lock the cost in

@Mincey0

Also these stats kind of show otherwise, people are dropping!

If you read the article, it also states the trend changed with the recent price reductions. People dropping is not a trend, people dropping due to the price hike just caused a devastating blow to their progress.

Isn't it a good number if you don't have crazy expectations?

@Balaam_ Who said they had lost 10 million subscribers? I don't recall anyone ever saying or even implying so

I mean, I plan to cancel my PS+ subscription this week and re-sub to the gamepass essential tier one-year for $80.

I’ve basically used PS+ for nothing but Overwatch for the past year anyways and XBOX has a lot coming soon I know I’ll be playing.

Plus playing Elden Ring right now offline is a little lonely 😔

@themightyant

.. and all the other pseudo maths. This isn't how subscriptions work,

Agree with all of this.

It's pretty disastrous. Services like this ONLY work at scale.

Dont entirely agree with this though. Yes, most services like Netflix indeed ONLY work at scale, but GP is different. Netflix only sells their subscription. If they spend 100 million on a show, they expect enough subscribers to cover the cost as that's the only way to justify it. Xbox sells their game in addition to adding them to the service. So they are not as reliant on scale as others.

It still is a failure to have messed up the growth but not because it becomes unsustainable. Instead it's because that growth is a backbone to the core of Xbox. GP subs dont just increase the bottom line, they also lock in players into the ecosystem (be it Xbox consoles or Xbox app on PC) and from there those users are more likely to buy third party products.

So yes, devastating to their strategy but it's not as critical for it to work at massive scale as it is for the likes of Disney+ and Netfllix.

@Coletrain I can see them feeling making GP any cheaper is not going to work financially for them, even if the player sticks for a full year. But that's where they could had use the lock-in as a means to mitigate the price hike.

In fact, I would dare say that Asha perhaps should had considered offering a 240 yearly sub as an alternative to removing CoD and lowering the per-month price.

“Started to grow again” is a meaningless metric without data, and typically just shareholder speak.
The new CEO isn’t going to say that it’s continuing to decline under their leadership; they want to point to the previous admin and look like they fixed it (a certain politician does this often and speaks in vague generalities).

I wouldn’t be surprised if a price cut grew the user base a little though.

@Coletrain

... but I'm thinking along the lines of if they had to take new CODs away...

Wanted to touch on this bit: the problem with CoD is that it was a massive acquisition. It's a game they expected to make GP grow. Problem with that plan was that anyone buying CoD was already certainly subscribed to either GP Core or GPU to even be able to play online (unless it was a rare "just want the campaign" CoD player).

The point with all this is that as soon as CoD got added to GPU, at most, it got some GPExtra and GPCore members upgrade to GPU for minimal boost in revenue. They got a few new users to hop into GP on PC for the first time but that likely did not justify the losses in sales from the previous status quo.

Point being, it's not the same to add a brand-new game to a service as part of its value as it is to eliminate an existing revenue line to justify that service's value UNLESS you can make that result in giantic service growth, something that was virtually impossible to happen.

THAT, is, IMO, why CoD addition to GP did not really math-out. It's not an issue with any other new titles being added to the service. It IS an issue for something that people have requested for a long time though: Adding WoW subscription as a GP perk. That wont ever work out.

And I’m back to my usual thing.
Sell a console sell a game pass you thick ***** microsoft. Being saying it for years.
More subscribers than the other two put together.

It was a great plan but they forgot about the amazing series x and s and how to sell them etc.
if console sales had double to 60 million that would another 15 million subscribers going on this data roughly.

@themightyant it’s ok saying it props up other departments etc. but if we are all being honest and realistic it’s because the numbers are being obscured everywhere.

The studio that makes Doom eats up all the costs, the sales do fewer numbers. And it’s day 1 on GPU that factors in none of the costs of development or advertising.

Now that’s not saying it doesn’t prop it up, but if you had to almost double the price to do so, then there’s a lot of issues being masked.

@themightyant I think it would "survive", but it would become a shadow of itself if it loses the revenue stream to justify securing third party deals. At minimal scale, GP would be forced to only add a few small indies and exclusively rely on first party offerings to re-grow.

@Mr-Cage I think the fact MS forces everyone to have some form of gamepass on xbox if you want any sort of online functionality. Since they basically changed the name xbox live to gamepass to inflate numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of xbox users out there have it. Plus there are people that still just have Xbox Ones (never upgraded to xbox series) who also have it.