Xbox Game Pass is failing and Microsoft is panicking

A reader considers the news that Game Pass growth is falling and suggests the subscription service isn’t working the way Microsoft hoped.

Depending on their share price on any given day, Microsoft is the richest company in the world, with totals assets of around $365 billion. So while they can easily afford to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion it’s not a drop in the ocean for them, it’s almost 20% of that amount. It’s the most expensive purchase they’ve ever made and one of the biggest in corporate history, and yet we still don’t know if it’s going to happen.

It probably will, because Microsoft are rich and rich people and entities usually get their way, but they’re obviously sweating at the moment, as they scramble to defend themselves from monopoly investigators. Having to pretend that things like Call Of Duty and cloud gaming aren’t actually a big deal after all is obviously getting them tetchy and you can see it in how increasingly irritable their public comments have been.

Microsoft is desperate to do well with games. I don’t know why really, since the goal to not let Sony take over the living room doesn’t even make sense any more, in the era of the smartphone. Their fixated on it though and yet they’ve never really been a big success. Even though the Xbox Series X/S is their most popular console since the Xbox 360 era it’s still sitting in last place this generation, just like usual.

For a while, with all their talk of having 3 billion people playing their games, it seemed like streaming was the future of their business, but regardless of what half-truths they’ve told monopoly commissions it’s clear that’s not going to be replacing consoles anytime soon.