Game Pass has caused a lot of direct sales losses to game developers in favor of Microsoft trying to find a Netflix-like cash cow for itself. The numbers never added up, but it is not a surprise everyone nodded and went along with it. I wonder what the career repercussions would be for speaking up - but it doesn’t matter because they are getting fired anyway.
I was always very skeptical of the $300 million figure. It sounded like the same math that the movie industry used for pirating. If I was subscribed to Game Pass I might have downloaded CoD to see what it's about. That doesn't mean I would have paid full price for it.
> Last year, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft estimated it had lost $300 million in direct sales of Call of Duty games due to the title’s inclusion in Game Pass, according to an anonymous employee.
Yeah, that's a bullshit number. It's like when people provide piracy counts as lost direct sales, a lot of people will download something for free, those same people won't always pay full price if they can't download it for free.
I downloaded a TON of games from Game Pass, played <1hr, and uninstalled. Without GP I would have just never bought the game.
Gamepass devalued games in my opinion. If you “train” your user base to get used to not buy games they will. It also did not help they were almost giving Gamepass away for nothing. You could chain multiple offers and get like 3 years or more of the best tier for the price of less than 2 games.
They never had the user base to sustain so many studios making AAA games under a subscription model.
Game Pass' finances ignored the one true thing about streaming services: they weren't going after the people buying DVDs, they were going after the people paying for cable.
Cable subscribers did not exist in gaming, and so Game Pass is stuck stealing Xbox's own customers. It just doesn't add up.
Call of Duty alone lost $300 million: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/04/microsofts-game-pass-...
I look forward to the source code leaks.