Lol. Who is doing mental gymnastics?
I just sided with
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
because for me it is surprising too, that revenue for Xbox division is that high compared to their competitors while they ended worst generation of their existence. And that it implies that Xbox is getting bigger chunk of money from every user then Sony.
I mean, Nintendo is selling Switch like gangbuster, they refusing to drop prices of their games, while selling 20+ million in many cases and their first-party output is best in terms of quality and quantity and they still had "only" 16 billion in revenues. Meanwhile Xbox is doomed according to many users around here because they didn't have new first party game months after new consoles released and they still managed to get to 15,4 billion.
Some people like to talk a big game but they're scared to crunch real numbers, because once you do some narratives just literally fall apart. Actually reading this post it's my first time seeing Nintendo's annual revenue figure (I don't really follow Nintendo stuff like that) and, yeah, one way to look at that is "..that's it?".
Considering they're at 80+ million Switches and their 1P games are evergeen price-wise and sales-wise, I guess some folks would think their revenue would be bigger. But then you remember that a ton of the big 3P games skip Switch due to technical limitations, though there is silver lining in Nintendo's revenue figure: their 1P probably constitutes a decent size of it, more than Sony's (which IIRC accounted for around 18% of their platform ecosystem revenue).
A lot of people IMO just focus way too much on hardware sales as the only metric, which is weird considering that, traditionally speaking, hardware doesn't sell for a lot of profit and for the first few years sells for a loss. Nintendo's gotten around that in their own way but it's obviously not a way everyone is going to be onboard with. Again, when I bring up the Xbox annual revenue compared to PlayStation's it's not a ding at PlayStation; they do have ~ $7 billion more in revenue.
I'm just saying that the relationship of hardware sales they've needed to get that extra revenue isn't linear and, arguably, might not be optimal compared to other business models. 150% more hardware for 46% more ecosystem revenue doesn't look particularly great to me but I don't know what the typical percentages platform holders use in this industry to determine what are good ratios on average for them, so that part is just me. And then when you look at both division's actual net profits, the ratios between them are even smaller, I think it's "only" a few hundred million separating them both in terms of net profit to Sony's advantage.
I hope the takeaway from this is, the industry is big enough where multiple business models can be successful in their own way. Sony's model is different from Microsoft's in a lot of ways, yet they both look more than healthy. Same for Nintendo.
Who cares? Sony gaming division makes more money and Sony sells double the amount of consoles of Microsoft. End of story. No mental gymnastics required to make Microsoft look good.
They generate 46% - 55% more revenue on 150% more hardware sales. All that was being point out, to show the relationship of revenue to hardware sales is not linear.
Anybody thinking MS paid 100m for Outriders on Gamepass needs to stop commenting on the business side of things.
It was likely a tenth of that, maybe slightly more (10-14m range).
Yeah, Outriders was a smaller/unproven AA game and not the type Square-Enix are known for on top of that. IIRC didn't some of the leaked documents from the Epic vs. Apple case show either Sony or Nintendo paying about $20 million for timed exclusivity? Think it was with something Monster Hunter-related.
There's 0% chance Microsoft paid anywhere near $100 million for Outriders on GamePass.