Sony and Nintendo will be the last gaming giants standing if Microsoft fails to meet its sales goals for Xbox Game Pass. That’s according to Xbox head Phil Spencer, who, as revealed by the FTC v. Microsoft documents that were released and subsequently removed today, told lawyers during a court event that Xbox would “exit the gaming business” if it failed to get 100 million customers to sign up for Game Pass by fiscal year 2027. Spencer mentioned this after he was shown a slide from the devices organization that forecasted 100 million Game Pass subscribers by FY29 and FY30—something that the executive apparently didn’t agree with and thought would spell the end for Xbox.
I do not believe that that is what the future Xbox business would look like. This is a presentation from our devices organization to the gaming leadership team, so this is the view from the team that is chartered with building our hardware on what the future business would look like.
I can fairly safely say that if we do not make more progress than this off of console, we would exit the gaming business. If this were the outcome, we would — I don’t believe we’d still be in the business.
A majority of our customers are found off of our own hardware, I would hope by earlier than 2030. So, when you asked me if I agreed with this chart that the light green and blue depending on what colors you see there would have to be much larger much earlier. I would say by FY26, ’27 that we should be in that position, or we’d have to make a different decision with the business.
Discussion (3 replies)
Join Discussion →As much maligned as I think MS is, I wouldn’t want to see them exit the marketplace.
That said I’m not about to go sub just to prop them up either
it's a bullshit statement and a marketing goal. Honest to god if they keep selling games on Xbox and PC and see steady product growth they will stick with it. Consoles might become streaming devices more or less but as long as games keep selling and people will pay the tax to be on MS platforms... it'll all be good.
Consoles are finally getting to a point where they are generating more PC games... even PC first games are being able to be ported and played on console.
Uh...
They have for a really long time. Why do you think for all these years that console games get ported to the PC, and not the other way around.
Here's just one article, but it's nothing new and has been this way for a pretty good while.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.gamesindustry.biz/report-pc-and-console-global-gaming-dipped-to-923bn-in-2022#:~:text=PC%20and%20console%20games%20(total,16.7%25%20year%2Don%2Dyear[/URL]
The sad part - Mobile dwarves all of that. (also includes PC/Console data, seems to come from same source as first link tho)
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.businessofapps.com/news/mobile-game-revenues-decline-6-7-in-2022/[/URL]