My Thoughts On Microsoft Buying Bethesda And Bringing Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Doom and More Into The Xbox Family

[Jim 0]

Just wow. Almost nobody saw this coming. Elder scrolls and Fallout are huge franchises and much beloved. Nobody can no longer claim that Xbox is all about Halo anymore. Can you imagine them releasing AAA title after AAA title every single year? That's amazing. I will say this though. I see a lot of game industry websites speculating about exclusivity and how Microsoft has to recoup their investment of 7 billion and to do that they need to release on as many systems as possible. 

And the whole time all Im doing is watching Xbox gamepass numbers increase month after month. In April Microsoft reported they had 10 million subscribers. Today they announced they have 15 million subscribers for those counting at home that's between 100 - 150 million in additional revenue coming in every month. Personally I see them increasing to around 30 million sometime next year. The service has reached a point to where its value is impossible to ignore.

Consider this. Disney plus launched in November 2019 its not even November 2020 and Disney plus says they now have 50 million subscribers! In less than a year they have 50 million subscribers and lets be real the value that you get from a Disney plus subscription while great, is nowhere near the value you receive from a Netflix subscription. I'm sure there are people that will disagree but Netflix has tons and tons of digital content. Netflix saw that the streaming wars were about to heat up and went on a spending binge to create more original content so they could compete when the big boys like Disney, HBO max and others tried to get serious in the streaming arena. Well Microsoft is doing the same thing, right now! They are buying up loads of studios and buy the same token they are acquiring loads of talent. 

There is plenty of room to grow, gaming is huge! And going into the holiday season I know they will be pushing gamepass like crazy. What parent says no to a service that they can purchase for 10 bucks a month and gives their kids 100s of games and will also give them tons of big budget games in the future? To me gamepass is a far greater value then Disney plus. If Microsoft sniffs 30 million by the end of next year they can pay off the Zenimax purchase in 2 years. If they hit 50 in less than a year though we are talking over 1 billion dollars in 2 years and I feel that is totally achievable. I think a lot of hardcode gamers will resist at first since there are a lot of diehard Sony 4 life fans(I plan on purchasing both consoles.) Eventually its just going to be so incredibly obvious. Gamepass' popularity is just going to snowball from here. 

When I was much younger Sega had a really cool service called Sega channel. I could play I think like 50 or so games a month as much as I wanted. Using that service I played games I never would have dreamed of even trying out had Sega channel not existed. I think gamepass is going to get better and better, month after month. And as word of mouth spreads at some point nearly every gamer will have it.