You're cherry picking. Here's my cherry pick -
Minecraft key stats
- Minecraft has 131 million monthly active users (PC Gamer), higher than Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone
- Minecraft has generated approximately $3 billion over its lifetime in game sales alone (The Verge)
- Microsoft acquired Mojang Studios for $2.5 billion in 2014, roughly 20 times the earnings of the company (Fool)
- Minecraft’s mobile version is responsible for approximately 30 percent of all revenue generated (Sensor Tower)
- Minecraft’s Chinese version, freely available in the country, has been downloaded over 400 million times (KitGuru)
- Minecraft: Pocket Edition is the most popular version of the game in North America, Asia and South America (US Gamer)
- YouTubers viewed Minecraft content 201 billion times in 2020 (Forbes)
- Minecraft Marketplace creators generated $1 million in revenue in two months (VentureBeat)
- Minecraft Education Edition has been downloaded over two million times (Fool) and 63 million pieces of content connected to the education platform have been downloaded (The Verge)
- The education edition generated $10 million in revenue in 2019 (Fool)
- Minecraft Earth hit 2.5 million downloads in its first 12 months (Pocket Gamer)
Source
Thats not really fair because the brand was already heavily established and nothing was changed about studio who makes it. Look at how halo ,gears, fable has been managed. Internal ip's by microsoft that MS meddled with. MS didn't meddle with anything when it came to majong, they just gave the studio tons of money to expand. The brand wasn't on a downhill decline, it was already huge.
Can we wait and see this Game Pass strategy play out before saying it's doomed? Games take time to make and some of these studios were literally just purchased. If we see nothing from Xbox first party by the end of 2022 then post away but honestly some of you are in for a massive wakeup call when those studios begin their release cycle.
We are literally at the beginning of what Game Pass will become.
Gamepass has been around for a while now, it's only now in the past year and a half it's grown. And I would argue because of high discounted deals, bundles with the system, nvidia graphics cards. And on top of literally adding EA, and Bethesda games to it drawing a lot more attention.
No one is saying it's doomed, it's that with what is going on in other mediums like NETFLIX, it's hard not to see that netflix does not make as much as people think, and just to keep themselves relevant spend more than they make half the time. Disney plus is showing netflix how it's done. They literally have 95 Million sub-scribers some of those probably verizon subs, but a lot of those are people like me who subbed for mandalorian and now are loving it because of all the backlog films/shows on top of new releases like Wandavision.
Disney has constant quality of content, which netflix doesn't have in the same volume at any given time. There are literally 3 shows debuting this year on Disney Plus that will make me continue to watch. I binged Cobra Kai and then didn't touch netflix again for over a month. And still I see myself going back to Disney and amazon because they seem to have more exclusive new shows/movies that I want to watch.
Thats Microsoft's issue, and we can say "things take time" all we want but the thing is all of those need to be super quality to compete what others are doing. If and when Sony or Nintendo revamp or create a new service with all their first party titles, I can bet you my account the pace at which people sign up to the service will outweigh how long it took MS to have 15 Million.
Disney Plus launched like over a year ago and has almost more than half of what Netflix has world wide. And NF streaming is older than 10+ years old. Thats the thing Microsoft has against them, and with what happened to halo, it does not breed confidence in people resubbing after their subscription runs out.
It's retention of subs that matters not the total number at any given time.