James Sawyer Ford
Member
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.
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.
You nailed it.
The biggest issue is that entertainment mediums is always going to be QUALITY over time. We all have limited free time, and have to make choices on what we choose to consume.
Microsoft could still do well with the strategy, but their studios are competing with a lot of content from everywhere else. Being merely "decent" won't really cut it.
So far their strategy of being third place every single generation seems like it isn't going to be changing anytime soon. But, we can all hope that they'll be a more relevant third this time around. The Xbox One generation was a huge black mark on the brand.