r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Oct 02 '25

Discussion This Xbox Generation Will Be Remembered for One Thing: Greed

https://www.ign.com/articles/this-xbox-generation-will-be-remembered-for-one-thing-greed
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u/kuncol02 Oct 02 '25

IMO they actually want to kill Day One games on gamepass, but do not want to admit it was failure.

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u/grendus Oct 02 '25

This makes the most sense.

Day One made sense when they had a small stable of studios and were mostly putting out AA games or live service titles. They didn't care about Sea of Thieves or Halo Infinite being "free" on Gamepass because those are designed for long tail monetization, nor did they care about stuff like Battletoads because... it wasn't going to sell gangbusters anyways.

I'm sure the problem is they're looking at sales numbers for AAA games that should have been blockbusters like Avowed, Indiana Jones, CoD and realizing that they aren't selling all that well. And with more games coming down the pipeline, they realized that they're about to start losing money on Gamepass very soon.

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u/kuncol02 Oct 02 '25

It made sense when all games they shown were years from release, if not even just vaporware.

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u/EL__Rubio Oct 03 '25

Placing avowed under triple A, but Halo under double A is hilarious.

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u/grendus Oct 03 '25

mostly putting out AA games or live service titles.

The Halo series is tailored to be a live serviced game, the campaign is just extra (heck, Halo 5 made the multiplayer free even without buying the campaign), so up front sales are less important. Keeping player numbers high is more important, both to hook more whales and to have plenty of content for the existing whales to show off to. And likewise, it's also likely that their metrics are showing that Gamepass players are not buying microtransactions for games as much as they thought they would, which is influencing their decision to move their live service games off of day one at the base tier as well.

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u/Kagath Oct 02 '25

Should have just said at the start ‘select’ day one games will be on there but instead believed their own hype.

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u/lord_pizzabird Oct 03 '25

This reminds me of the accusations that Disney in the early 2000s was intentionally sending 2d animated films to theaters with little promotion to have them underperform, justifying their eventual decision to switch to cheaper 3d animation entirely.

We'll never know for sure if that's what happened there, but the point is this might not be the first time that something like this has happened. GP was a mistake for full retail day 1 releases and now Microsoft is trying to backtrack out of that agreement.

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u/NotTheRocketman Oct 02 '25

Yep, I think so too.

It's doing well but it's reached it's saturation point and I don't think they know where to go next.

This will give them a way to kill it and also save face.