Heisenberg007
Gold Journalism
The financial side of gaming companies and console manufacturers has always intrigued me. Gamepass presents a unique and very interesting challenge regarding the measurement of a game's commercial success.
For multiplayer, free-to-play, and live-service games, developers can simplify this problem by sharing metrics such as concurrent players, attach rate, in-game purchases, dollars earned through MTX, etc. That'd give us a somewhat reasonable idea of how a game performed.
However, I'm not sure how it would work and what metrics would be needed to measure the commercial success of a single-player XGS game that is releasing on Gamepass day one, because:
P.S. A natural extension of this question would be that how will Xbox measure which games were successful for them and which needs to be dropped in favor of other games and new IPs.
For multiplayer, free-to-play, and live-service games, developers can simplify this problem by sharing metrics such as concurrent players, attach rate, in-game purchases, dollars earned through MTX, etc. That'd give us a somewhat reasonable idea of how a game performed.
However, I'm not sure how it would work and what metrics would be needed to measure the commercial success of a single-player XGS game that is releasing on Gamepass day one, because:
- Engagement metrics and attach rate won't necessarily be good enough to measure the commercial success of a single-player game.
- On the other hand, if a game doesn't sell many copies, a valid argument would be that the game is available on Gamepass day one. Hence, the low sales figures. That would make sense but it still wouldn't tell us much if the game was a success or not.
P.S. A natural extension of this question would be that how will Xbox measure which games were successful for them and which needs to be dropped in favor of other games and new IPs.
