General Gaming News

[Lenny Solidus]

[Sly Boots]

[Alan]

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry ... ntent=null

[Raid]

I've been under the impression that Microsoft knew what they were doing with Game Pass, that they had access to figures that showed giving gamers access to a hundred games for a relatively low subscription fee was still profitable over selling them a handful of that same number. I questioned how long it would take them to recoup the $60 billion price for Activision Blizzard at the time, but hey, they presumably had a plan, right? This is Microsoft we're talking about, they're presumably fairly good at making money. Is.... is that not actually the case then?

That $300 million loss on Blops 6 is being reported as if it took them by surprise. We knew that as of a few months back Game Pass had 35 million subscribers, and that Kotaku calculation of requiring 15 million new people signing up for one month to make up that $300m doesn't really make sense. They've only sold 33 million XBox Series consoles, so even if you assume every single console owner is subscribed (which is a ridiculous assumption in itself), they'd still need 17 million PC subscribers to make up the numbers. That's not impossible, there are a lot of PC gamers afterall, but it doesn't feel likely when PC players have access to far more reasonable game prices.

I'm obviously not a corporate strategy expert, but given the expectation of gains measured no further than the end of the next quarter (because shareholders are the only people that companies that size care about and god forbid the stock price sinks even a tiny bit), I just can't see how the Activision Blizzard acquisition makes any sense.

[Wrathbone]

Nothing Microsoft has done with gaming this generation has made sense on the surface. There’s no point me trying to understand the financial figures because at that level of business, it’s like pinning down smoke. Gone are the days of simple profit and loss based on selling a product or service, otherwise Xbox and Game Pass would have been a financial catastrophe five years ago. Instead, they hit record numbers last year.

I don’t think they have a clue what they’re doing as a gaming platform anymore, and I don’t think that matters to them because I do think they know what they’re doing financially. I have doubts that they lost $300m in potential sales revenue for COD - not everyone who played it on Game Pass would have otherwise bought it. It’s more likely that they’re pushing that line to justify more layoffs, or for tax evasion reasons.

[Alan]

I don’t think they’re doing that though. 300mil is only around 4mil sales. COD typically sells 20-30mil copies. With 82% sales on PS I think 300mil is conservative.

[Wrathbone]

Could it not just be that the world is sick to death of COD and the change of hands to Microsoft was the wake up call (of duty) that some people needed?

[Alan]

You would think but you’d be wrong :p

I’d actually love a new CoD to play if they got rid of the mtx vomit covering everything. It’s a real fun game to play at its core but the loathing I feel just by its title screen… urgh. Even a remaster of Blops 1 or 2 that ran on steam deck I’d be well up for. That said I hear the CoD4 remake was garbage on PC so :/

[Animalmother]

https://www.purexbox.com/news/2025/10/s ... in-members

[DjchunKfunK]

Considering that figure is basically a guess I struggle to take it very seriously. Without knowing the methodology behind the estimate it's a worthless figure that just looks good in headlines. For all we know they could have taken everyone who subbed to Game Pass as a lost CoD sale.

[Animalmother]

So I cancelled my Xbox subscription. Have had one since about 2010 I think. Might jump ship to Sony and actually use my PS5.

[Lenny Solidus]

Destiny 2 on Steam is currently on the verge of having lost 300k players since launch two years ago, that might not sound all that bad, but this is Bungie we are talking about. It sits right now at an all-time low of just 17k as a so-called "free to play" title which anyone who has ever touched it knows is a complete fabrication.

https://thegamepost.com/destiny-2-playe ... ting-game/

That's what you get, you greedy bastards.

[Alan]

It was just in a humble choice too, youd think that would give it a boost.

[Raid]

https://www.eurogamer.net/another-devas ... rs-stunned

This is sorta relevant to me because I really *want* to like the Pokemon franchise, I think it's a masterpiece of simple but compelling game design and world building with a wonderfully chill atmosphere, but there's an utterly infuriating lack of direction considering just how ridiculously profitable it is. And now we're learning that they're only spending $13million on a major release? The previous entry in the main series sold 27 million copies, so the income would be over 1000x the development cost of the product if the dev costs were similar, which is crazy. *And* that game in question was absolutely panned on release because of how lazy and shoddily-programmed it was.

I find the whole Pokemon game franchise utterly baffling. Good will should only be accounting for a tiny portion of this by now, a lot of the kids the game is marketed towards wouldn't even have been born at the point when the games didn't feel like zero-effort cash grabs. There's so much they could be doing with it, including, please for the love of god, a mode with increased difficulty to make me actually want to play one of them again, and they must have the money to take a few risks. Why is one of the most successful games franchises of all time still so poorly managed?

Like, I get it, companies don't want to spend more than they need to on a product, but it's like this franchise completely defies the common logic the rest of the industry follows, and there's absolutely no interest in producing a worthy product. Some of the art assets in Scarlet and Violet would have been poor twenty years ago, and it's astonishing how little pride Nintendo show for what has consistently been their biggest money-spinner for three decades.

[Mantis]

I suppose you could argue why bother putting any budget or effort in when the franchise just prints money on its own? The return for their investment is absolutely incredible and I'm not sure how much making the games actually any better would really improve the sales given absolutely everyone already buys them.

It's a kids franchise that increasingly seems to be simplified with almost every entry. Entire new generations of kids are being bought it by their parents whilst those of us who grew up with Red, Blue and Yellow still buy it in the vain hope that they might have put a bit more effort in this time to make it more compelling for adult players.

What bugs me is that they consistently put out pretty poor entries in the series and then relentlessly pursue every other development with lawsuits who dare to use any similar gameplay mechanics.