Their new business model is great for gamers right now is all that should really matter on these forums. But if you are interested in how it is performing then sustained massive drops in Xbox reported revenue over the next few quarters going into next generation that is not explained just by expected loss of hardware revenue is your place to watch or hope as may be the case :)
No, that's the only thing that matters to some. There are many others here that also like to discuss the industry at large, and that also matters when this forum is made up of gamers and industry professionals. Just because some only care about "whats good for the consumer" doesn't mean others aren't interested in the buiseness side.
FWIW I totally get what you're trying to do here and I agree people are overly defensive. Analyzing numbers with due rigor isn't console warring, people.
Completely over defensive. "OH NO X person isn't gushing over the number of people playing a game and is looking at it critically/in a business sense they must be a console warrior/troll!"
Well, it is certainly not useless. It just doesn't answer the question you're asking. It is still a very big number. Three million people played the game in the week it released! That shows that there is a significant interest in Game Pass. The Game Pass model is working for them.
And as I said earlier in this thread, it's been proven time and time again that people do not just cancel subscriptions after a promotional offer ends. People often continue to subscribe for long periods of time. That is why these other services offer promotional sign up deals! Look at Disney. They are launching Disney+ which will of course he a massive success so why are they doing this promotional deal where you can pay something like $3/month for the next 3 years? Why would they do that. Get people in the door, they will not leave. So this number means something. You just aren't seeing it, it appears.
But they didn't give "new sub" numbers. That's why its mostly useless. If they already had 3 million subs, and this didn't cause any new sign ups, that wouldn't be good, correct?
Well yes, you're stating the obvious. More details are provided to shareholders at earnings calls. Definitely more than in blog posts.
Are you an exec or shareholder ?
Actually, no. It's not even remotely meaningless. All sorts of projections can be made from this number provided. This says a lot more about you failing to apply creative thinking to this.
Learn from this; just because Data is provided in a form you don't appreciate, that doesn't mean it is useless
"players", and not subs, or new subs, etc, IS mostly a useless number. I don't need to be a exec/shareholder to care or want to see. that's why physical sales were so nice. It was MUCH easier to see how a game did, relative to other games.
But you would never evaluate a subscription business so early in it's tenure. That would be the worst thing to teach at any business class.
Exactly, and its why this number is meaningless and mostly PR fluff.
MS isn't releasing this number for anybody on Era to evaluate their business model.
I know, they are releasing it as PR to sound good. that's why game sales were nice from NPD, as those were easy to evaluate.
