Imagine a business seeing 37% YOY growth, the year after the COVID boom and it being painted as a negative.
Some of you guys are crazy
They are at 20 million according to Zhuge. That means they were around 15 million when the year started. So 5 million new subs in a year? Is it really that great? If Xbox consoles sold 5 million in a year, would you say they had a great year? After all, isnt that what gamepass is aiming to do? Make console sales irrelevant as a metric to gauge success in the industry?
And it is not AFTER the Covid boom. The Covid boom lasted all year last year. So from July till December, we were still in the covid boom. And this year they have just released a new console. Two in fact. Numbers should be better than that. Especially for a service thats just starting out.
Here are some stats on the covid boom.
It’s another sign that Microsoft’s Game Pass bet is starting to pay off.
www.theverge.com
They went from 10 million to 15 million during the first six months of covid from April to September.
Then they added 3 million from September to December.
Microsoft’s gaming subscription service is steadily growing.
www.theverge.com
So technically they had added 8 million users during the covid boom's 10 months. Then just 2 million in the next 6 months. Not great, not terrible. But I can promise you that if the next six months bring just 2 million new users, you know heads will roll.
I suspect Halo and Forza will bring in new users, but will they stick around? Thats why you need big games on the service on a consistent basis. The Forza crowd will stay around another month for Halo, but what then? They need to make a deal with From Software today and announce it so people dont let the sub lapse in January. Right now Redfall is their only game until Summer 2022. Then Starfield 6 months later. They need to fill the remaining months with AAA content. Clearly Outriders, Medium and MLB arent enough.Elden Rings, Dying Light 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Batman Court of Owls, Suicide Squad and Avatar are some of the bigger AAA games coming out next year. Avatar and Suicide Squad are probably too expensive, but the rest should be affordable for a company with 20 million subs. Thats $200 million in monthly revenue so they should be able to give $150 million to From which should equal 2.5 million sales.