It’s been a little over 4 years since the Xbox Game Pass model has allowed Microsoft to make the best days of broke and / or bulimic gamers. But while a quinquennium rich in announcements soon comes to an end, the positive results have not necessarily ticked all the boxes.
Subscribers of the rental service according to Microsoft are therefore used to it: twice a month, new titles enrich a constantly rotating catalog, which shapes the future of video games according to Microsoft, as evidenced by a certain Xbox Series S lacking physical drive. But if the manufacturer congratulated itself at the start of the year on the very good performance of the Game Pass, which helped boost the revenue recorded by the Xbox Content and Services branch, the results just released did not necessarily live up to expectations.
Pass Pass Tour
After a largely pandemic and contained fiscal year 2020, which allowed Microsoft to exceed its growth targets by 15 points, the 2021 vintage will undoubtedly not have the same flavor, since the growth of the subscriber portfolio is limited to 37%, for a stated objective of 48%. Microsoft has yet to provide a detailed explanation for this half-hearted result, but The Game Pass represents all of 5% of revenues thanks to its versions on PC and the Ultimate formula, a decrease of two points compared to last year.
Unfortunately, the total number of current subscriptions will not have been updated for the occasion. And so for the time being, we have to deal with the 18 million officially recency customers in January, despite Strauss Zelnick’s wet finger estimates not long ago.
The wrong Pass?
Beyond the monthly income, the company has every interest in wanting to boost the number of players, since subscribers on average spend more time playing, play a greater variety of titles, and (especially) spend more at stake than the others. Growth therefore seems logically to be settling, but the all-out promises of the leader Phil Spencer concerning the hypothetical return of more or less disappeared series or the praise of Square Enix during the launch of Outriders should reassure subscribers about the maintenance in the long term. of the formula. Fortunately, a certain Halo Infinite can give hope for a good fiscal year 2022.
While waiting to know the updated number of subscribers, let us recall in any case that players will be able to take advantage of the arrival of Dragon Ball FighterZ, Echo Generation and Everspace 2 from tomorrow, while waiting for the rest of the delivery at the end of October.
