I love how you understand that the topic is about number of users, then you go into a meaningless discussion about retail sales when you've known for months that MS places significant value on MAUs and Gamepass subscription.
In reality, Microsoft being focused on engagement metrics rather than sales is mostly spin. All games companies are more interested in engagement metrics these days and Microsoft are no different, but in the end they talk about the stats which show their games in the best light and where they've released games that are doing relatively well on sales/player count and perhaps less so on engagement metrics they talk about sales and player count. In the case of this thread, this statistic isn't even coming from Microsoft - they've given us a player count stat because it's all they can give us. It won't be long until Microsoft do officially talk numbers and I'd be pretty surprised if we don't hear them talk actual sales numbers because they are undoubtedly strong. In the end though, if Microsoft
are talking about total player counts they are giving us a number that gives us the least clear picture of how successful the game is. It is a number that
can be strong even if retail sales and engagement figures aren't.
In this thread, the notion that talking about retail sales is 'meaningless' is absurd. This is a direct comparison between a game which was on Game Pass and one which was not. The headline figure of over 100% growth would be
incredible if Forza Horizon 4 wasn't available via Game Pass whereas, with Game Pass in mind, it's an impressive but predictable gain.
In the end, while Game Pass is a revenue stream for Microsoft and no doubt one they believe in massively for the future, there is a significant difference between the customer who buys Forza Horizon 4 outright and the one that pays for Game Pass to play it and the one that already has Game Pass and downloads it anyway. Admittedly, Microsoft no doubt pay a great number of people to try and figure out the value of a given game to Game Pass and for us to even guess would be fruitless. All the same, it is obviously the case that a game with 5 million sales is
far more impressive than one with three million sales and two million Game Pass downloads.