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Microsoft Q2 2022 earnings are out

Leyasu

Banned
Yes, they did grow recently because in hardware they released a console and in software now they added the Zenimax revenue there. In a couple of years its software part will grow more because they'll ad Activision Bizzard.

Nothing of that info is related to Gamepass.
Microsoft are using gamepass revenue to offset the running costs of their studios and pay for content. Think of it like a giant crowd funding.
 

Loope

Member
You say this like it is a bad thing. What is the problem with having more information?
Because it only matters (in this particular case) for console warring.

I trust that shareholders, investors etc. have access to all the information. Can't see why some forum dwellers need it so much outside of trying to shit on a news article about some company making money.

Now, explain to me why it so important for you and the other people (and i recognize some for their "affilliation" to another brand) to have all that information?
 

oldergamer

Member
It doesnt. actually.


Sony gaming division constantly carrying other unprofitable divisions for almost a decade already is an example of this.

Microsoft doesnt release numbers for Xbox is because its unprofitable, its being carried by Windows. Shareholders would push to sell a division like that, like they have to Sony for its film business.


This Activation purchase will prolly save Xbox as a platform. Having COD makes Gamepass becoming a failure pretty hard.
That is a dumb and uninformed post.
 

John Wick

Member
It's funny reading some of the comments in here. Ask any question about numbers or revenue and it gets put down with the usual excuses. Shareholders have that information you don't need to know blah blah blah.
You'd think that some of the users here think whenever MS does well it's their bank balance that is doing well and they are billionaires or something. It's laughable and quite sad how some think they are part of MS success at making money lol.
 

JLB

Banned
They wasted a ton of money in gaming. investors still want them out of gaming, the division has done nothing but force them to spend spend spend.

/
English Letter GIF by NeighborlyNotary®
 

Ozriel

M$FT
It's funny reading some of the comments in here. Ask any question about numbers or revenue and it gets put down with the usual excuses. Shareholders have that information you don't need to know blah blah blah.
You'd think that some of the users here think whenever MS does well it's their bank balance that is doing well and they are billionaires or something. It's laughable and quite sad how some think they are part of MS success at making money lol.

I suspect if you didn't have your questionable post history, people would be more inclined to giving your questions the benefit of the doubt.

Nobody in this thread is in a position to answer your questions on granular breakdowns of revenue and profit on demand. Repeatedly popping up in MS Earnings call threads to demand for data that won't be provided is basically trolling.

They wasted a ton of money in gaming. investors still want them out of gaming, the division has done nothing but force them to spend spend spend.

To think you people get this way because of mass market plastic boxes.
 

FunkMiller

Member
Earnings reports like this really do put the ‘company console war’ into perspective.

MS aren’t at war with Sony, and they haven’t been for a long time.

You can just about make a competitive association between XBox and PlayStation, but the companies that produce them? Forget about it.
 
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Below is an Old, non up-to-date version listing the Largest Countries with GDP that Microsoft is currently Wealthier Than!!

But Last I checked, Microsoft is now valued at 2.3 Trillion making them Wealthier than India, Canada, Brazil and Italy!!

 

Plantoid

Member
Below is an Old, non up-to-date version listing the Largest Countries with GDP that Microsoft is currently Wealthier Than!!

But Last I checked, Microsoft is now valued at 2.3 Trillion making them Wealthier than India, Canada, Brazil and Italy!!

Market cap doesn't mean wealthier...

But yes, Microsoft is fucking rich and richer than at least 50 countries, together
 

MScarpa

Member
They really really really need those game sales from Playstation though!

That money would be fuckin pocket change.
I keep saying this but apparently I'm crazy. Microsoft doesn't give 2 fucks about money made off games on Playstation. This is all about growing Gamepass and starving out the competition.
 
I keep saying this but apparently I'm crazy. Microsoft doesn't give 2 fucks about money made off games on Playstation. This is all about growing Gamepass and starving out the competition.

And how do you think that GamePass is going to find the widest audience?

Hint: it isn’t to “starve” the largest console userbase that is quite happy with the titles available on their platform

This is more about strongarming GP to PlayStation, not starving it. MS can’t do the latter no matter who they buy
 
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reksveks

Member
I keep saying this but apparently I'm crazy. Microsoft doesn't give 2 fucks about money made off games on Playstation. This is all about growing Gamepass and starving out the competition.
And how do you think that GamePass is going to find the widest audience?

Hint: it isn’t to “starve” the largest console userbase that is quite happy with the titles available on their platform

This is more about strongarming GP to PlayStation, not starving it. MS can’t do the latter no matter who they buy
Both kinda wrong, it's about increasing usage of the MS/Xbox store. I don't think GP on PS leads to that.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Any profit?
Nobody knows because MS combines all sorts of stuff into buckets.

Similar to Apple. Apple has 5 buckets of sales data:

- Phones
- Mac
- iPad
- Watches
- Services

But for profits, they lump all 4 products into one bucket, and services is on its own. So nobody can tell how profitable their gadgets are individually.
 
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Welcome to the world of subscription metrics where you are given meaningless data.

Much like how Netflix counts a 'view' as someone viewing just two minutes of something. Two fucking minutes. Shit the intro to a TV show eats up half of that let along all the logos and bollocks before a film.

So the same will apply here, get used to getting numbers of players which could easily be someone who thought 'this is free, I'll check it out' played it for 5 seconds thought it was shit and then deleted it.
TBF, there's an equivalent to this when it comes to sold games/products as well. A lot of people may look at a certain game hitting 5 million, 10 million etc. units sold and think those are all at initial MSRP. But a good amount of times, a bulk of those copies are sold at a sale price, or in some cases the game might've been bundled in a packaged SKU so essentially given away for free.

A decent example of this is SFV; I think it's at around 6 million units sold now, but the vast majority of those were either at discounted sales prices or given away for free during certain weekends coinciding with specific tournaments (and their promotions). Even games like Uncharted 4 and Spiderman had a portion of those sales come through discounts or included in specific PS4 bundles, meaning in the case of the latter they'd of basically been given away for free.

Metrics-skewing might be a bit more egregious with subscription-based models, but it hinges on what skewing is occurring, which might differ by model type (if it's occurring at all), and it's not something exclusive to subscription models whatsoever.

The surface has actually found its niche. Alot of students and work professions use it due its form factor and flexibility. My son has one for school and wife uses it for work for its portability.

Some of the newer ones have pretty nice form factors and their design ergonomics seem generally excellent going by all the reviews, my issue with Surface is that they seem lower-spec'd for their price than what you can get out of an equivalent Asus, Dell, or Lenovo device, and those all tend to have great build quality and ergonomics as well.

You usually have to pay a premium for a higher-end Surface device with similar specs to high-end devices from the aforementioned brands (just generally speaking...the other brands have some pretty premium-priced high-end stuff themselves that sometimes might not seem ideal if looking at the specs you get...I'm mainly talking of 2-in-1 convertibles and tablet convertibles here, same with Surface), tho I do get the reasoning. They basically want to position them as a boutique brand like Apple's stuff, and Apple's probably even more guilting of overpricing for what you get.

I wouldn't mind picking up a third-generation Surface Laptop Studio, though.
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
TBF, there's an equivalent to this when it comes to sold games/products as well. A lot of people may look at a certain game hitting 5 million, 10 million etc. units sold and think those are all at initial MSRP. But a good amount of times, a bulk of those copies are sold at a sale price, or in some cases the game might've been bundled in a packaged SKU so essentially given away for free.

A decent example of this is SFV; I think it's at around 6 million units sold now, but the vast majority of those were either at discounted sales prices or given away for free during certain weekends coinciding with specific tournaments (and their promotions). Even games like Uncharted 4 and Spiderman had a portion of those sales come through discounts or included in specific PS4 bundles, meaning in the case of the latter they'd of basically been given away for free.

Metrics-skewing might be a bit more egregious with subscription-based models, but it hinges on what skewing is occurring, which might differ by model type (if it's occurring at all), and it's not something exclusive to subscription models whatsoever.
Ya.

Metrics can definitely be skewed, but it's still directional in nature.

It's be like Twitter saying they got the most users at xxx. A lot of those are burner accounts, spam, or someone made a profile and never used it ever again. But it's still got a shit ton of active profiles.
 

yurinka

Member
Microsoft are using gamepass revenue to offset the running costs of their studios and pay for content. Think of it like a giant crowd funding.
Compared to $80B spent in their 3 biggest acquisitions, the revenue from GP must be peanuts. We don't know the revenue from GP, but let's assume:
-They have 25M subs
-All these 25M pay the most expensive tier, the $14.99/month GPU feee
-Zero of them is using a $1 upgrade from Gold
-Zero of them is using a $1 first month promotion
-Zero of them got some GP months for free from some other random promotion
-Zero of them got GP/Gold cheaper on cd key stores
-Everyone paying it on USD instead of using other currencies/countries where it's cheaper

In these ideal conditions which are all far from reality, that would be $374.75M/month, $1.12B/quarter, $4.5B/year in revenue. Right now the real numbers must be way smaller than these ones and pretty likely this is why they don't meantion them. As a reference, Sony shows their 'network services' (Plus + Now) game subscription revenue and it's almost $1B/quarter but these Sony subs combined have 2X the subs of Gamepass and way less promotions to get it months for free or for $1.

We also have to consider that would be revenue from GP, not profits. From this revenue we'd have to subtract the money sent to the 3rd party games put there, taxes, server costs from the store, multiplayer and cloud gaming, marketing and promotions, etc. And this is without considering the costs of the 1st party games that would be primarly monetized mainly via gamepass if aren't a microtransaction fest or multiplatform games mostly sold in consoles without gamepass.

TBF, there's an equivalent to this when it comes to sold games/products as well. A lot of people may look at a certain game hitting 5 million, 10 million etc. units sold and think those are all at initial MSRP. But a good amount of times, a bulk of those copies are sold at a sale price, or in some cases the game might've been bundled in a packaged SKU so essentially given away for free.

A decent example of this is SFV; I think it's at around 6 million units sold now, but the vast majority of those were either at discounted sales prices or given away for free during certain weekends coinciding with specific tournaments (and their promotions). Even games like Uncharted 4 and Spiderman had a portion of those sales come through discounts or included in specific PS4 bundles, meaning in the case of the latter they'd of basically been given away for free.

Metrics-skewing might be a bit more egregious with subscription-based models, but it hinges on what skewing is occurring, which might differ by model type (if it's occurring at all), and it's not something exclusive to subscription models whatsoever.
I've been monitoring the SFV case since the start comparing total sales, vs Steam sales or concurrent users, game stats and learnt many things from there:
-Like in most games, over half of the sales are sold discounted and very cheap
-The 6M doesn't include the limited time free trials or players from PS Plus
-The user retention has been way longer than in SFIV series or in most other fighting games from the competition
-Periodical new features, content, fixes and tweaks not only not only increased retention, but did help the game to continue selling many years until launch (released in Feb 2016, still frequently sells around 100K/200K per quarter)
-Many of the most played characters are dlc characters (even if you can unlock some DLC chars by playing)
-When a dlc character released, almost always became the most played character of the month
-When playing online, way over half of the players have DLC characters, costumes, color or stages
-As in many other GaaS, the game must have generated way more revenue from season passes/dlc/microtransactoins than from sales
-Its last update in sales was 6.0M, the best selling Capcom fighting game ever is at 6.2M, so combined with its DLC/mtx/season passes pretty likely has generated more revenue than any other previous Capcom game (but releasing in a single console, in other games counted ports or revisions -which here are free updates or paid/unlockable dlc for the main game- separatedly).
 
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What the "any profit?" on gaming division crowd doesn't understand is Game Pass is generating a massive amount of money aka revenue for Microsoft's gaming division per year, and so even if the gaming division ultimately isn't turning a profit and is actually losing money, they're probably not losing nearly as much money as people think because of Game Pass helping to counterbalance things. So essentially what that means is they can still carry on with their operations undeterred. Whatever amount of money that might be lost on the gaming division side is most likely insignificant enough that the massive gains from the rest of the company's operations more than make up for it, and even then it still continues to be in Microsoft's overall long-term financial interest to maintain their position in the gaming space and not risk being shut out by others.

This is how business works. Even at my company there are specific areas that don't make money, but it's still vitally important for us to stay involved in those money losing areas anyway because they are worthwhile endeavors that could grow to become as important as our primary money makers.

Microsoft willing to toss $7.5 billion and another $68.7 billion at their gaming division should be enough to tell people that there is more going on inside the balance sheets of that gaming division than people suspect.
 
I've been monitoring the SFV case since the start comparing total sales, vs Steam sales or concurrent users, game stats and learnt many things from there:
-Like in most games, over half of the sales are sold discounted and very cheap
-The 6M doesn't include the limited time free trials or players from PS Plus
-The user retention has been way longer than in SFIV series or in most other fighting games from the competition
-Periodical new features, content, fixes and tweaks not only not only increased retention, but did help the game to continue selling many years until launch (released in Feb 2016, still frequently sells around 100K/200K per quarter)
-Many of the most played characters are dlc characters (even if you can unlock some DLC chars by playing)
-When a dlc character released, almost always became the most played character of the month
-When playing online, way over half of the players have DLC characters, costumes, color or stages
-As in many other GaaS, the game must have generated way more revenue from season passes/dlc/microtransactoins than from sales
-Its last update in sales was 6.0M, the best selling Capcom fighting game ever is at 6.2M, so combined with its DLC/mtx/season passes pretty likely has generated more revenue than any other previous Capcom game (but releasing in a single console, in other games counted ports or revisions -which here are free updates or paid/unlockable dlc for the main game- separatedly).

I'm aware that in terms of revenue SFV's been very good for Capcom, and that particularly nowadays it's been financially sustainable and successful. But the reason I threw it in as a mention was just to show that going solely by unit sales (as in traditional packaged content unit sales at retail) isn't always a great indicator of a game's success and that those metrics can be skewed by things like discounts and packaged offerings in SKUs.

So the skewing of certain numbers presented at face-value can happen with games outside of a subscription model same as it can happen with games in a subscription model. The types of skewing might differ but the act itself can be present in both, and in all cases it kind of hinges on if someone accepts data presented to them from the source or is skeptical of it for some reason. If they're skeptical, though, then they also have to understand that people can similarly have justification in being skeptical about data others might take without questioning.

I think for certain legality reasons (not just to the wider public, but also shareholders and any agencies like the SEC that'd eventually push investigations if results weren't lining up with reported statements for a long period of time. For example, Disney somewhat recently were being looked at by the SEC for cooking the books) the companies themselves either don't skew their reported data, or don't take ludicrous means to skew them. Plus, if they go with not mentioning anything publicly other than the numbers, you can't really have an argument that things are being skewed through omission of information.

But yeah, rounding back to the point I just wanted to show that data given at face value can be "not exactly as they appear" for games regardless of the metrics used to obtain and provide that data, whether it's a F2P GaaS on a subscription model, or a packaged retail game sold on a digital storefront and brick & mortar stores. I was never intending to imply SFV performed poorly by using it as an example, it was just a convenient example to use for illustrating that point.

Ya.

Metrics can definitely be skewed, but it's still directional in nature.

It's be like Twitter saying they got the most users at xxx. A lot of those are burner accounts, spam, or someone made a profile and never used it ever again. But it's still got a shit ton of active profiles.

True. But that kind of reporting will eventually cause some type of collapse, because other metrics would not line up with the numbers given or the way those numbers (like most users at specified date) are presented and allowed to be interpreted by the public, shareholders, etc.

So there still has to be some type of limit as to how much companies can skew certain metrics, because other data through other metrics eventually act as a natural corroboration and can expose extreme skewing if it might be happening. Some companies probably do treat metrics skewing as the new "book cooking" accounting departments in certain places love to do, I just think it would be astronomically harder for larger companies offering real services and products of tangible benefits (including most importantly financial) to clients. Twitter offers no genuine service of any real, measurable benefits to its users, so skewing certain metrics is likely way easier with that type of platform.
 
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Ozriel

M$FT
This is more about strongarming GP to PlayStation, not starving it. MS can’t do the latter no matter who they buy

There’s no need anymore to ‘strongarm’ Gamepass to PlayStation. It would only be possible via xCloud, and they can get xCloud running on the TVs gamers hook their PlayStations to.

It actually pays MS more to make xCloud available directly on Samsung and LG TVs, in the Google play store for Android TVs and to make apps for Firetv sticks. All that, and they won’t have to pay any cut to any other platform holder.
 

Jemm

Member
There’s no need anymore to ‘strongarm’ Gamepass to PlayStation. It would only be possible via xCloud, and they can get xCloud running on the TVs gamers hook their PlayStations to.

It actually pays MS more to make xCloud available directly on Samsung and LG TVs, in the Google play store for Android TVs and to make apps for Firetv sticks. All that, and they won’t have to pay any cut to any other platform holder.
Also, native Game Pass on PlayStation would mean adding one more platform to port, test and support games for. Streaming makes more sense, like you said.
 

yurinka

Member
I'm aware that in terms of revenue SFV's been very good for Capcom, and that particularly nowadays it's been financially sustainable and successful. But the reason I threw it in as a mention was just to show that going solely by unit sales (as in traditional packaged content unit sales at retail) isn't always a great indicator of a game's success and that those metrics can be skewed by things like discounts and packaged offerings in SKUs.

So the skewing of certain numbers presented at face-value can happen with games outside of a subscription model same as it can happen with games in a subscription model. The types of skewing might differ but the act itself can be present in both, and in all cases it kind of hinges on if someone accepts data presented to them from the source or is skeptical of it for some reason. If they're skeptical, though, then they also have to understand that people can similarly have justification in being skeptical about data others might take without questioning.

I think for certain legality reasons (not just to the wider public, but also shareholders and any agencies like the SEC that'd eventually push investigations if results weren't lining up with reported statements for a long period of time. For example, Disney somewhat recently were being looked at by the SEC for cooking the books) the companies themselves either don't skew their reported data, or don't take ludicrous means to skew them. Plus, if they go with not mentioning anything publicly other than the numbers, you can't really have an argument that things are being skewed through omission of information.

But yeah, rounding back to the point I just wanted to show that data given at face value can be "not exactly as they appear" for games regardless of the metrics used to obtain and provide that data, whether it's a F2P GaaS on a subscription model, or a packaged retail game sold on a digital storefront and brick & mortar stores. I was never intending to imply SFV performed poorly by using it as an example, it was just a convenient example to use for illustrating that point.
Sure, many years ago made more sense to look at sales units because they were basically the only revenue source, and after some time they got a single price cut but not as of today, when they get some insane discouts frequently and quite soon after launch.

Plus now they have many additional revenue sources like dlc/mtx/season passes (and in the case of GaaS they focus here, and they replace revisions/updates that in the past were released as separate games) plus revenues from including the game in subscription services, merchandising, eSports and so on.

At the same time, obviously it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare users from a F2P game, or from a service that can be played for free or $1 with some promotions, with sold units. So probably the only metric we'd have to compare any type of game would be to check out all the total revenue generated by each game by they very rarely share this number. And it would be difficult to have this numbers for games designed to be monetized mostly or partly with a susbscription where there are multiple games, as would be the case of games released day one on gamepass, since you can't know which percent of the service is due to this game, unless you'd split the revenue of the subscriber between the time he spent on each game.

True. But that kind of reporting will eventually cause some type of collapse, because other metrics would not line up with the numbers given or the way those numbers (like most users at specified date) are presented and allowed to be interpreted by the public, shareholders, etc.

So there still has to be some type of limit as to how much companies can skew certain metrics, because other data through other metrics eventually act as a natural corroboration and can expose extreme skewing if it might be happening. Some companies probably do treat metrics skewing as the new "book cooking" accounting departments in certain places love to do, I just think it would be astronomically harder for larger companies offering real services and products of tangible benefits (including most importantly financial) to clients. Twitter offers no genuine service of any real, measurable benefits to its users, so skewing certain metrics is likely way easier with that type of platform.
I think that at the end, investors may look at revenue and costs, and operating profit of the whole package.

Meaning 'this company has a volume of X revenue per year, has these assets like IPs or teams, plus this cash or debt, and has that growth or operative profit' without caring about the details of each specific project or game.

In the case of MS, I assume their investors or stakeholders may think: these guys made insane investments but the corporation as a whole can afford it. As a result of that they revenue will increase even if they may need at least a decade to recoup them, but also help them get great positioning in new markets for MS like mobile gaming or eSports, to get a huge amount of valuable IPs, plus a huge growth on PC and a big growth in console revenue (mainly due to revenue non-MS consoles) and game subscriptions, which would have a great long term growth, even if in gaming it's still a tiny portion of the gaming market revenue maybe in some years may happen the same than in music and cinema/tv where subscriptions became the main portion of the market.

So even if they are burning cash and there may no have big market impact other than mostly adding the revenue from the purchased companies to MS, in the very long term the bet may work.
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
True. But that kind of reporting will eventually cause some type of collapse, because other metrics would not line up with the numbers given or the way those numbers (like most users at specified date) are presented and allowed to be interpreted by the public, shareholders, etc.

So there still has to be some type of limit as to how much companies can skew certain metrics, because other data through other metrics eventually act as a natural corroboration and can expose extreme skewing if it might be happening. Some companies probably do treat metrics skewing as the new "book cooking" accounting departments in certain places love to do, I just think it would be astronomically harder for larger companies offering real services and products of tangible benefits (including most importantly financial) to clients. Twitter offers no genuine service of any real, measurable benefits to its users, so skewing certain metrics is likely way easier with that type of platform.
I agree. It can be shady.

But I'm pretty sure revenue or profit per user or account is important too. So they cant artificially boost user counts or else their $$$/metric looks shit.

That's probably why so many of them do this MAU shit, but even then everyone's definition of active user is going to be different so it's still not apples to apples.

If GP has 25 million accounts but 18 million are active users every month, I have no idea what that even means (unless MS has defined it and I never read it). Is an active user someone who logs into Xbox, checks out what games are in the GP list, says forget it and logs off until next month?

Technically that guy did use it that month.
 
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MonarchJT

Banned
The 8% growth of the gaming division compared to what? I assume compared to the same quarter of the previous year (Q2 FY2021), but do we know how much revenue made the division in this quarter?
doesn't matter the company get 18.something b it's fuckin rich ) Xbox division is a joke ,Phil a charlatan and naughty dog are the best devs.....but the division get 75b of investiments in one year ..and just with the money of this Q they could get most of the japanese publisher
now tell us how you really feel
 
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Sure, many years ago made more sense to look at sales units because they were basically the only revenue source, and after some time they got a single price cut but not as of today, when they get some insane discouts frequently and quite soon after launch.

Plus now they have many additional revenue sources like dlc/mtx/season passes (and in the case of GaaS they focus here, and they replace revisions/updates that in the past were released as separate games) plus revenues from including the game in subscription services, merchandising, eSports and so on.

That might be the case for MP-orientated games like Street Fighter, but it isn't the case for all types of games in general. Also the community for games like SF consists of a lot of hardcore users who tend to be "whales" in that ecosystem anyway, even if the community is way smaller than other MP-centric games (generally in other genres).

Again I didn't throw SF5 into that as an example to suggest it was performing poorly, it was just a convenient game to include in the conversation about games that may have moved a certain number of units but where those alone don't tell everything about the revenue the game's had if a lot of those copies were at discounts or (in other game cases) essentially "given away" in bundled SKUs.

At the same time, obviously it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare users from a F2P game, or from a service that can be played for free or $1 with some promotions, with sold units. So probably the only metric we'd have to compare any type of game would be to check out all the total revenue generated by each game by they very rarely share this number. And it would be difficult to have this numbers for games designed to be monetized mostly or partly with a susbscription where there are multiple games, as would be the case of games released day one on gamepass, since you can't know which percent of the service is due to this game, unless you'd split the revenue of the subscriber between the time he spent on each game.

Well there are a couple caveats here. I generally agree that comparing users on a game that's F2P on part of a subscription service to individual units sold (digitally or physically) isn't the best practice, but if the service we're talking about here is GamePass in particular, it's not really given for "free" (outside of a 2-week to 3-month trail, the latter I know was offered with Series S units over the holiday) and the $1 fee is a conversion from 3 years of XBL Gold so the user is essentially still paying for the GamePass service for that period, it's just been converted from an ongoing XBL Gold sub to a GPU one (and that already comes with XBL Gold anyhow). You can't just sign up for any form of GamePass for 3 years for $1 without having an equivalent XBL Gold subscription, to my knowledge anyway.

Revenue for games in a service would be nice to have, that I can also agree with, because ultimately whether it's via subscription service or sold units, revenue generated matters WAY more than copies sold or MAU IMHO. It might not be much, but we do have some indicators of revenue for certain Microsoft 1P games in GamePass, or in lieu of GamePass in some cases. Forza Horizon 5 sold roughly equivalent to 1.45 million units converted to a $70 price prior to its launch into GamePass, and Halo Infinite debuted at #2 on NPD for December.

If we had some numbers for Pokemon's NPD December performance, it'd be a good indicator for where Halo Infinite probably actually landed, but we would definitely know what baseline amount of revenue the campaign alone generated for the launch month. By any standard, it's probably a pretty hefty amount, and you can then add the MTX from the MP side on top of that for a cumulative picture.

That said, per-game revenue figures for titles on GamePass, or just MS games in general, would be neat to have without all the need for extrapolation and guided guesswork. I wonder if shareholders (or at least certain shareholders?) get additional details not shareable with the public at large due to legal contracts? I've no idea there.

I think that at the end, investors may look at revenue and costs, and operating profit of the whole package.

Meaning 'this company has a volume of X revenue per year, has these assets like IPs or teams, plus this cash or debt, and has that growth or operative profit' without caring about the details of each specific project or game.

Yeah, this is probably how investors, shareholders etc. look at it. At the end of the day it's up to companies like MS to make sure all the pieces line up accordingly as expected, but as long as they are, they can justify giving a truncated look to investors/shareholders and not bog them down with a lot of potentially redundant numbers.

In the case of MS, I assume their investors or stakeholders may think: these guys made insane investments but the corporation as a whole can afford it. As a result of that they revenue will increase even if they may need at least a decade to recoup them, but also help them get great positioning in new markets for MS like mobile gaming or eSports, to get a huge amount of valuable IPs, plus a huge growth on PC and a big growth in console revenue (mainly due to revenue non-MS consoles) and game subscriptions, which would have a great long term growth, even if in gaming it's still a tiny portion of the gaming market revenue maybe in some years may happen the same than in music and cinema/tv where subscriptions became the main portion of the market.

So even if they are burning cash and there may no have big market impact other than mostly adding the revenue from the purchased companies to MS, in the very long term the bet may work.

That's likely how shareholders, investors and the ilk view it, yep. You've got a stake in the company as a whole, so you're primarily interested with the full picture. It helps to know how the individual pieces are going of course, but if you have a strong piece here and a really weak piece elsewhere, even without disclosing it you're going to be able to infer regardless thanks to the cumulative numbers provided, as you'd see stagnation in certain projected forecasts, or revenue and/or profit shrinks in certain areas of the company.

The big numbers will reflect what's really happening, anyway, and if a company's cooking the books, they'll get looked into regardless. There's no reason to suspect that's happening here, though; groups like the SEC are up in these company's asses almost all of the time, if they suspect foul play they'll launch that investigation. That's what happened to Disney not too long ago, for example.

I think the moves Microsoft are making with subscription gaming services and the cloud are definitely considering longer-term outlooks here, and it presents a massive growth opportunity for cloud-powered solutions as well as additional revenue streams not just on the side of us playing the games, but the companies leveraging cloud software and hardware services & solutions provided to them by companies like Microsoft. The recent MS/Sega deal is an example of this: it might not translate to any big IP revivals that I'd of personally wanted, or console exclusives that certain people on Xbox might've wanted, but that's still a client for MS functioning as another revenue stream for them regardless.

I agree. It can be shady.

But I'm pretty sure revenue or profit per user or account is important too. So they cant artificially boost user counts or else their $$$/metric looks shit.

That's probably why so many of them do this MAU shit, but even then everyone's definition of active user is going to be different so it's still not apples to apples.

Yeah, that's for sure true. I think there's some big differences even between services in the same field. Netflix's definition of a MAU for example differs a lot from Disney+'s definition, and so on and so forth.

If GP has 25 million accounts but 18 million are active users every month, I have no idea what that even means (unless MS has defined it and I never read it). Is an active user someone who logs into Xbox, checks out what games are in the GP list, says forget it and logs off until next month?

Technically that guy did use it that month.

I don't think it's that loose; MS still need to have satisfactory numbers to justify making various 3P content deals for the service, and provide numbers appealing to 3Ps to convince them to jump in. If the criteria is that rock-bottom then those deals would dry up so fast xD.

IMO I'm guessing they define MAU as a user who spends a certain amount of logged time playing equivalent to the average logged playtime someone does with a game across console platforms in general, and probably spends a certain minimum on additional content in line with the typical MTX spending habits of players in games across platforms in general, be it for games they pay for traditionally or are F2P (or both).

3P publishers would likely ask for such equivalents from a company like Microsoft and use other measurable metrics from other platform holders to compare to. They likely take that into consideration alongside whatever money is being provided to them (and on what terms), to determine if they want to put certain content into the service. That's my conclusion, anyhow.
 
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TheGrat1

Member
Because it only matters (in this particular case) for console warring.

I trust that shareholders, investors etc. have access to all the information. Can't see why some forum dwellers need it so much outside of trying to shit on a news article about some company making money.

Now, explain to me why it so important for you and the other people (and i recognize some for their "affilliation" to another brand) to have all that information?
Pretty sure MS does not release that info, even to investors, or it would have leaked by now. They used to disclose console sales, then they stopped. They did not start giving that info out in secret to avoid giving ammo to forum fanboys. They could not care less about that.

I never said it was "so important" to have that information. However, you seem to think it important that that info is not shared.
"I trust that shareholders, investors etc. have access to all the information."
"These dudes want to know more than shareholders themselves."
^These two statements are contradictory. If you though they were going to have more info than shareholders then you would not be confident that the shareholders have that info. It seems you have an interest in no negativity being placed on MS' games division.

TL ; DR: More information never hurt anyone. If you just want less warring, there is an ignore function. Edit: This is a gaming forum where we discuss gaming, of course people are going to want to know about the gaming division. We could not give a fuck less about how much profit Office 365 and Azure bring in.
 
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Compared to $80B spent in their 3 biggest acquisitions, the revenue from GP must be peanuts. We don't know the revenue from GP, but let's assume:
-They have 25M subs
-All these 25M pay the most expensive tier, the $14.99/month GPU feee
-Zero of them is using a $1 upgrade from Gold
-Zero of them is using a $1 first month promotion
-Zero of them got some GP months for free from some other random promotion
-Zero of them got GP/Gold cheaper on cd key stores
-Everyone paying it on USD instead of using other currencies/countries where it's cheaper

In these ideal conditions which are all far from reality, that would be $374.75M/month, $1.12B/quarter, $4.5B/year in revenue. Right now the real numbers must be way smaller than these ones and pretty likely this is why they don't meantion them. As a reference, Sony shows their 'network services' (Plus + Now) game subscription revenue and it's almost $1B/quarter but these Sony subs combined have 2X the subs of Gamepass and way less promotions to get it months for free or for $1.

We also have to consider that would be revenue from GP, not profits. From this revenue we'd have to subtract the money sent to the 3rd party games put there, taxes, server costs from the store, multiplayer and cloud gaming, marketing and promotions, etc. And this is without considering the costs of the 1st party games that would be primarly monetized mainly via gamepass if aren't a microtransaction fest or multiplatform games mostly sold in consoles without gamepass.


I've been monitoring the SFV case since the start comparing total sales, vs Steam sales or concurrent users, game stats and learnt many things from there:
-Like in most games, over half of the sales are sold discounted and very cheap
-The 6M doesn't include the limited time free trials or players from PS Plus
-The user retention has been way longer than in SFIV series or in most other fighting games from the competition
-Periodical new features, content, fixes and tweaks not only not only increased retention, but did help the game to continue selling many years until launch (released in Feb 2016, still frequently sells around 100K/200K per quarter)
-Many of the most played characters are dlc characters (even if you can unlock some DLC chars by playing)
-When a dlc character released, almost always became the most played character of the month
-When playing online, way over half of the players have DLC characters, costumes, color or stages
-As in many other GaaS, the game must have generated way more revenue from season passes/dlc/microtransactoins than from sales
-Its last update in sales was 6.0M, the best selling Capcom fighting game ever is at 6.2M, so combined with its DLC/mtx/season passes pretty likely has generated more revenue than any other previous Capcom game (but releasing in a single console, in other games counted ports or revisions -which here are free updates or paid/unlockable dlc for the main game- separatedly).

I get wanting to run the numbers but you're missing the point. It's typical MBA corporate attack on a new industry segment; gaming subscriptions. Basically they're developing, buying, innovating their way into market leadership while shutting out major players for years. Any business studies worth a damn will highlight the usual first to market enjoys the largest growth, revenue/profit and YoY increases. The market fragments as other competitors enter the fray of that segment as does the YoY growth/profit for that segment. Over time the explosion in growth wipes out the myriad of industry players and you're left with 2-4 major players with 1 or 2 owning the vast percentages of market share. Everything else is 1% shit MS does not care about.

They do this by creating their own hardware, remaining open to other platforms, developing their own studios/IPs, buying studios/IP (which is a two pronged attack, fast track yourself and set back competitors plus the bonus of gobbling up industry talent) while delivering access anywhere on recurring revenue models e.g. subs and MTX/add-ons. xCloud is an extension of MS going all in on Azure, which Satya Nadella (CEO) has been absolutely instrumental since helming the MS ship.

It's not just about raw numbers, for now. You're missing out on tax avoidance/reduction, future expansion, corporate tactics, talent farming and a whole host of what these sorts of moves MS is making accomplish. They're pushing serious numbers already in terms of subs, spend and asses in seats. This leads to a compound effect just like Netflix etc; partners, content, designers, devs, indies and more all want part of that cascading action. You're also missing the intangible flows e.g. join the xbox/windows/gamepass ecosystem and over time you're likely to use other services e.g. office sub, movies/apps with purchases/subs and more.

Gaming used to be 3 player checkers. Shit is now 4D chess against 10 players, flowing in and out of alliances, and bets by spectators affecting the pool.
 
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Kagey K

Banned
TL ; DR: More information never hurt anyone. If you just want less warring, there is an ignore function. Edit: This is a gaming forum where we discuss gaming, of course people are going to want to know about the gaming division. We could not give a fuck less about how much profit Office 365 and Azure bring in.
It actually could hurt MS as a business.

If people think Gamepass is losing money hand over fist other companies will be scared to buy into the model.

If MS proves they are making money hand over fist on the model thier competitors will come in sooner.

Its better for them to keep it as vague as possible, instead of paving the road and then sharing information to help make it easier for the competition.

This is one of those areas where you would like to disclose as little information as possible while you grow it.
 
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yurinka

Member
I get wanting to run the numbers but you're missing the point. It's typical MBA corporate attack on a new industry segment; gaming subscriptions. Basically they're developing, buying, innovating their way into market leadership while shutting out major players for years. Any business studies worth a damn will highlight the usual first to market enjoys the largest growth, revenue/profit and YoY increases. The market fragments as other competitors enter the fray of that segment as does the YoY growth/profit for that segment. Over time the explosion in growth wipes out the myriad of industry players and you're left with 2-4 major players with 1 or 2 owning the vast percentages of market share. Everything else is 1% shit MS does not care about.
Sony has around 2x gaming subs subscribers than MS and generates even a bigger proportion of revenue, plus also has way lower costs for these subscriptions so are way more profitable.

On top of that Sony has 2x the console userbase (selling at gaming history records even if constrained by the chips issue), highly engaged and buying more games per console than any other console in gaming hisotry, which allows them to have more revenue from gaming mostly thanks to the 30% cut they get from the shit ton of games/dlc/mtx sold for their console.

xCloud is an extension of MS going all in on Azure, which Satya Nadella (CEO) has been absolutely instrumental since helming the MS ship.
Xbox always has been known for hiding and twisting all the metrics that didn't look good, to a point that it's pretty hard to know the performance of not XCloud, but the whole Gamepass. They never shared a single number about the amount of people that uses Xcloud, or at least GP Ultimate. So could even be a total flop with 3 people using it. If they would have a higher number than their competition they would have bragged about it, and isn't the case.

We have no idea of how Xcloud it's performing but we can assume than worse than their direct competitor. And what we know is that they spend over $80B on purchased companies to provide content, plus additional minor acquisitions and smaller 3rd party deals to put games on GP. Which combined with the server (meaning, between other things paying a shit ton of electricity and internet) costs of cloud gaming lead us to think it isn't a pretty profitable deal at least for now.

It's not just about raw numbers, for now. You're missing out on tax avoidance/reduction, future expansion, corporate tactics, talent farming and a whole host of what these sorts of moves MS is making accomplish. They're pushing serious numbers already in terms of subs, spend and asses in seats. This leads to a compound effect just like Netflix etc; partners, content, designers, devs, indies and more all want part of that cascading action. You're also missing the intangible flows e.g. join the xbox/windows/gamepass ecosystem and over time you're likely to use other services e.g. office sub, movies/apps with purchases/subs and more.
If you're talking about business and not about magic yes, it's about raw mumbers: revenue, profit, userbase, market share, growth, amount of appealing IPs and teams, etc. MS spents dozens of billions to acquire important IPs and teams because by themselves couldn't compete with their own weapons. Now adding the revenue of ABK (if they don't remove the revenue they get from PS) at least they will be able to compete in revenue, IPs and teams and will help to increase the game subs to see if they reach Sony in that front.

Gaming used to be 3 player checkers. Shit is now 4D chess against 10 players, flowing in and out of alliances, and bets by spectators affecting the pool.
In consoles they continue being 3 players and MS continues being the 3r one in all fronts. In PC and mobile there are a ton of key players and MS recently purchased the position of being one of them on PC and mobile.
 

reksveks

Member
Sony has around 2x gaming subs subscribers than MS and generates even a bigger proportion of revenue, plus also has way lower costs for these subscriptions so are way more profitable.
Source?

Xbox doesn't share subscription revenue. Sony doesn't share cost to this level.

Sony kinda does* and it is 383,012M JPY so its 3.3BN USD over the year off ~42M ps+ users and 4M ps now. (ARPU is between 6.54 usd and 5.98 usd)

They also include the ps video i think but it probably is menial.
 
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Lognor

Banned
Excellent results from Microsoft! They are really firing on all cylinders!

I bought some more shares last week expecting excellent earnings. And then of course when earnings came out the price plummeted. Fuck this market. But since Wednesday the price is on the rise. I'm a long term holder so I don't get too bogged down on drops in the short term.
 

yurinka

Member
Source?

Xbox doesn't share subscription revenue. Sony doesn't share cost to this level.

Sony kinda does* and it is 383,012M JPY so its 3.3BN USD over the year off ~42M ps+ users and 4M ps now. (ARPU is between 6.54 usd and 5.98 usd)

They also include the ps video i think but it probably is menial.
According to MS they have 25M subs, according to Sony they have ~47M Plus+~3M Now subs (which in a few months would be merged on a single service). Which is around 2X the subs.

Sony shares their 'network services' revenue (Plus+Now) of their gaming division (separated form Crunchyroll/Funimation/etc). As I remember it was around $900M in a quarter or so.

Even if you consider that these 25M GP subs have zero '3 PC GP free months' promotions bundled in other services or products, $1 first months/$1 Gold to GPU upgrade, cheaper sales via key stores, cheaper sales in certain countries and if you assume 100% of their subs pay the most expensive $15 tier, that there are many active Gold subs who don't want the $1 upgrade and that MS doesn't pay taxes for GP (which obviously these assumptions don't make sense at all, none of them are close to the reality) then they'd make $375M/month or $1.1B/quarter. So even in the fantasy world they barely they would get Sony sub numbers. Pretty likely MS doesn't make even the half or a third of that $1.1B/quarter.

Don't even bother with this guy. He doesn't have sources on anything. He just makes shit up. You should see his argument on why COD will not have any impact on Sony. I think he said it actually helps their bottom line!
According to CityGroup Sony gets from their 30% cut of everything related with CoD around $80-260M/year (which would mean around 1/3 of CoD series yearly revenue is made on PS, Acti said they make $3B/year).

$260M/year in revenue is around 1% of the $25B/year that the Sony gaming division generates.

Go to cry and lie somewhere else. Goodbye.
 
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Imagine if game pass would come to modern TVs as streaming service. Microsoft wouldn't even care about their consoles anymore because player base would be gigantic.
 
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