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Good, hopefully this means more reasons for games to be also on Xbox, not removing them on other platforms. I'd like to see more of a even parity situation where 1st party are the key differences.
Epic has passed savings onto me in the past like Red Dead Redemption 2. Once it came to Steam it was full price and Epic had a sale and I bought it on Epic. There have been other games chepaer on Epic store too, I am constantly comparing prices.
Seems like odd phrasing to me, "strangle them" as Sony continues to lead the charts by quite a margin and use it's brand and dominating position to easily get third party deals. Sounds like Microsoft is simply growing tired of getting scraps and are finally using their financial clout to try and compete better.
Are some people that scared to see Sony in a position where they "only" sell 50-60 million consoles in one generation? Microsoft and Nintendo were there multiple times and also at times well below that figure.
This type of hyperbole from some Playstation fans is what led to the "Doom and gloom" on this forum for a few weeks. Sony and Playstation will be just fine. If Sony or Nintendo is eventually forced into doing the same kind of percentage cut , then that only helps developers.
Microsoft making moves to be competitive is great. The 12% thing is going to be great for developers. MS have made a lot of very good moves over the last few years that will make them relevant for a lot of people. If you want to play all the best games this gen, you need to be in both ecosystems. Any other console war bullshit is just puerile and a waste of time.
Eh I don't know, seems like another "Xbox is getting rid of the Gold requirement" situation. It seems like a tall order to convince the shareholders that they should give up over half of the revenue per copy sold on the console store. PC-side situation makes sense because they seem to be siding with Epic and probably make peanuts there anyway
Exactly. Sony has been doing its best to try and hamper Nintendo and Microsoft for decades by methodically getting deals from third party and it looks like ol' Jimmy is going to put that gas pedal tactic to the floor this generation to try and curb and added threats they forsee.
No other console maker is also putting their games on PC same day and date, their business model has changed and with xCloud it's going to rapidly evolve again.
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Nah. There are enough games that are paid to be kept off Xbox that this would make less likely for some pubs
Except the Gold thing is "baseless" rumor and this is court paperwork from Xbox that's referencing it, so it has a lot more credibility. Obviously not set in stone until an official announcement.
Just in case you missed it, the doc is referencing getting streaming rights as part of that share. Microsoft wants to avoid an Nvidia situation where people pull out their games from xCloud. Seems like a fair trade for Microsoft. You get more money per sale, we get your game on xCloud and grow game pass.
Epic doesn't go below 12%
- if you use Unreal engine, you don't need to pay the 5% EXTRA when selling on EGS, on all other stores you would pay Store cut + 5%, so on Steam 30% +5% to 20% + 5% (based on revenue) on MS Store, 12% + 5%
- the dev/pub also has to pay whatever percent influencers get from promoting their games with affiliated links (up to 10% I think), EGS only pays the influencers directly when there is a moneyhat in the exclusive timeframe
- EGS also doesn't eat the cost for non-standard payment methods
xCloud is already a win/win/win. The customer gets utility, Microsoft gets a feature differentiator from their competition + access to potentially new customers, and the publisher or owner of the game gets access to that exact same expanded customer base, which could increase their sales, at no extra cost. In fact, Microsoft is paying out of pocket to rent consoles to people who may not have them so they can buy your game! Could you imagine publishers getting salty if tomorrow Xbox announced that they were giving out free consoles to everyone who signed up for gamepass ultimate? Why would they, right? It's the same thing here - except those free gamepass consoles are hosted in a datacenter, so there is a legal distinction here that they can take advantage of that they otherwise couldn't.
The "loss" or "downside" is that, technically, the publisher/owner of the game can maybe sell streaming exclusivity, leveraging that for money. Most of them never will, because most companies won't be willing to pay much for streaming on 99% of all games released. For the prestigious few, maybe they can get some nice cash out of it, like CoD or Battlefield would definitely be able to leverage streaming rights for example. But how much would Sony or Stadia be willing to pay for streaming rights on random indies, or even small/mid tier games? Long term, probably not much.
Microsoft losing 60% of the revenue they would earn off every sold copy of a 3rd party game is a steep price. If that's the only price pubs are willing to go for, then that's a fairly tall order. Microsoft has obviously considered this under some circumstances (hence the document we're seeing), however the precise details of which are maybe known only to those inside Micrsoft itself, and this also might have just been one of many proposals. If they did actually roll this out as a general thing anyone could opt into, then almost everyone would opt in, and it would represent a huge, sudden drop in revenue that Microsoft would 100% definitely not be able to make up by whatever competitive advantages and expanded reach they get from cloud streaming in the short or medium term, and there's a chance it would never compensate, depending on how many people are actually willing to jump into the Xbox ecosystem only through the cloud. If you think about it from Microsoft's perspective, the calculation is simple - if they divided their revenue by 2.5x, then they would need to increase total revenue by 2.5x through other means to make up for that - and that increase would have to happen through the advantages gained by dropping the cut to 12%, not just a 2.5x increase through any means (because they would have had those other unrelated increases even if they didn't drop the cut, if you follow).
I think it will happen once Game Pass reaches a certain threshold where cutting Xbox store revenue does not impact their bottom line. We don't know what that number is, but it's an idea currently being kicked around internally with no firm date other than an ambiguous CY 2021, which may not even be the time in which the revenue split will happen. I imagine by 60 million GP subscribers is when the split will happen in addition to Gold going away because at that point, Game Pass is now Xbox.
No, Metro Exodus has always been super cheap in my region. Right now it's US$14.99 and not on sale.
Yes, only Sony has done this . MS has never done that not even during the 360 days...🥴
That's regional pricing which is not related to the cut. Steam has regional pricing for most regions too, Epic seems to have it in more regions though.
They would still get "100%" revenue of 1st party content and subscriptions regardless. This would benefit 3rd party content providers and increase attractiveness of the platform ecosystem, and as such this would be important and pretty amazing move, win-win for all.
but not a lot of smaller games especially from Japan
that depends entirely on whether every store has regional pricing in your region or not. In my case, only EGS does.
So, you make less than half the money for people who play Fortnite on Xbox and in return you get Atlus to make a port that sells less than a million.
It doesn't make sense to me.
Epic only has lower prices when they offer the 10$ coupons. Which is not really passing savings as they are selling the game at a loss.
User Warned: Meta Commentary Drive-By
People told me Xbox doesn't do timed exclusives though 🤔🤔
That's funny since in an interview from earlier this week, there were "no plans at this time" for a PS4/5 version of the game.
I am so sick of hearing that answer from companies when it comes to timed exclusive deals, is there really any harm in going "yes this is an ___ exclusive but we do have plans to release it on ___ in the future." It makes the platform that has the timed exclusivity look very scummy making you think it's never coming to other platforms, plus it makes the developers look bad when they have to lie and say stuff like this.
I am so sick of hearing that answer from companies when it comes to timed exclusive deals, is there really any harm in going "yes this is an ___ exclusive but we do have plans to release it on ___ in the future." It makes the platform that has the timed exclusivity look very scummy making you think it's never coming to other platforms, plus it makes the developers look bad when they have to lie and say stuff like this.
Probably they can't talk about any other platform due to the temporal exclusive contract.
Why would they pass it to us? The devs won't want less $ from their games. Games would stay same price, just a bigger cut would go to devs
Yeah I don't know why people here continue to believe this. A bigger cut, $70 price, and microtransactions? That's a publishers dream and it's all going straight into their pockets.
Hmmm, hard to believe.
The 3-month window on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 raises some alarm bells. Even if they recently said "no plans" which would mean they still cannot divulge anything, it's the shortest exclusivity window yet on a bigger title.
And after Cuphead's "lifetime exclusive" agreement, I would have to laugh if anyone argues that The Gunk being a "perpetual exclusive" means anything. These are just marketing buzzwords designed to seed doubt and promise, and they work.
The 3-month window on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 raises some alarm bells. Even if they recently said "no plans" which would mean they still cannot divulge anything, it's the shortest exclusivity window yet on a bigger title.
And after Cuphead's "lifetime exclusive" agreement, I would have to laugh if anyone argues that The Gunk being a "perpetual exclusive" means anything. These are just marketing buzzwords designed to seed doubt and promise, and they work.
WWZ cut it's price before launch. Their reasoning was the lower store cut. It's def an outlier but it did happen.
This is about the long term ecosystem growth. If MS has 100+ millions of paying users via PC, Xbox, and xCloud (extending to various platforms such as iOS, Android, web/PC/Mac), it becomes almost impossible to not port to the MS platform.
Sony/Nintendo would then have to pay more for exclusives to offset any potential loss of not going all platforms first. MS benefits from having more games port to it and they'd get a small cut of every sale, successful or not.
I've heard more about GamePass + Xbox from my "social" network than PS5 this time around because of the value of Gamepass alone.
In fact, I've played more games on GP than I ever had and I bought the actual games that I ended up liking a lot but wouldn't otherwise buy/play at full price.
Dropping to 12% and asking for Xcloud rights is a win, win and win for MS. It doubles the pressure on Sony/Nintendo to offer more and MS gets more of anything that can go their way. More games, less exclusives, and GamePass gains in value.
Metro Exodus also did it. It was clearly a PR move done as shown by how it happened after Tim sweeney said things like that could happen (and never happenef afterwards).
If this goes ahead, I would fully expect Sony will try to sue Microsoft for predatory pricing, since I don't think they're in a position to get close (especially considering 12% would render gift cards unprofitable), whereas Microsoft has lots of avenues to cross-subsidise Xbox.
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Microsoft explored reducing its Xbox store cut to shake up console gaming
Microsoft had wanted to cut fees to just 12 percentwww.theverge.com
Saying at this time and all that, but for now we have a denial.
Of course. People actually buy games via the Xbox marketplace unlike the Windows store. They don't want to reduce their cut of Xbox console games when that's the sweetest plum of them all.
Of course they have but again Sony's brand has consistently pulled them through and that brand awareness started well before Xbox came out. Even with a $600 console and inferior third party versions it still sold as well as the 360.
When you have decades of third party franchises known to be PlayStation staples like Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid and so on consumers adopt the philosophy that the system is the one to get for the majority of the games. Sony knows this and continues to use this tactic to this day and is by far the most eager to keep pursuing this method because they know it works. That's why it's funny to hear all of the sudden as Microsoft uses its warchest now people fear Sony is going to suffer.
Suffer in which way, "only" selling 80 million systems in a generation?
They are passing it onto me, the consumer, which was my argument.
It is an "obvious" win if we forget that they make less than half the money from all microtransactions of games like Fortnite, Call of Duty ...
You need spectacular growth to make up for that. We are talking about that if Xbox sold twice they would still lose money doing this.
I would think regulations are in place to prevent stuff like this. There was a PlayStation leak not long back that said REVIII could not be sold for less on a competing console. Is it possible for a developer to sell a game on a competing store for less with the exception of regional pricing. Does steam have a public developer guideline?
Good luck to them, predatory pricing is incredibly difficult to prove.
They have to essentially prove that MS is not doing this as part of competition (the EGS situation can be used by MS to prove this). Otherwise, they then have to say that all companies must stick at 30% cut, which itself is collusion and illegal as well.
They also have to prove that MS is doing this to cut down the competition but MS is exchanging value as well , 12% instead of 30 for the rights to keeping the game on xCloud. Given that Sony/Nintendo doesn't have anything of sort, that can serve as a mitigation factor.
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You must have missed the summer showcase they had in 2020 with a bunch of timed exclusive
Thats not how it works. They are not passing any savings of the cut to you (as that would be the publishers putting lower prices). Epic in this case is paying top money to try and get you to buy games in their store, nothing to do with the store cut (hell, they could more easily do with a bigger store cut, as that would decrease the game price whhere they are a net loss of money).
That would be illegal and price fixing. In that case it is probably more related to marketing deals. In reality games are just "same price" everywhere because if the customer is conditioned to pay a high price, why decrease the price on another place and possibly harm possibly higher earnigs?
Irc, Steam does have guideline on Steam keys (where they say you should offer a similar deal to Steam users in a reasonable amount of time), but not on non-steam keys.
