Earlier this week, the British regulator published documents from Sony and Microsoft on the US corporation’s deal with Activision Blizzard. These documents contain a lot of interesting information – each of the companies tried to explain their position: Sony believes that the deal will lead to a serious advantage for Microsoft in the console market, Microsoft explains that this cannot happen.
We have previously published separate excerpts from the Microsoft document. But user ResetEra analyzed Microsoft’s 111-page response in its entirety and picked out some interesting points from it about the challenges the Xbox business is facing:
Here and further [X] means that the information provided by the company has been excluded from the public document.
As one of the new Xbox competitors in the console market, Microsoft names Steam with the prefix Steam Deck. Users with multiple consoles usually prefer the Playstation. According to the survey cited in the document: 60-70% of gamers who own Xbox and Playstation reported that their favorite console is the Playstation – [30-40]% Playstation 4, [20-30]% Playstation 5, [10-20]% Xbox Series X, [10-20]% Xbox One. Sony and Nintendo do not allow Game Pass to appear on their devices, although they can do it without any problems, a browser solution is expected. Microsoft writes that Activision Blizzard is a company that is opposed to subscription services. It is said that Activision has never published new content on multi-game subscription services and has no intention of doing so in the future. However, when Microsoft acquires the company, it plans to offer publisher games as much as possible on Game Pass. World of Warcraft will most likely not appear under Game Pass – it is said that it is “technically very difficult to integrate” the project into a subscription. Microsoft expected that the number of subscribers Game Pass will hit 35 million by July 2022, but that didn’t happen. [X]% of the global PC gaming segment and [X]% in the UK. xCloud has a very weak performance so far – in December 2021, xCloud worldwide had only about [X] million MAU, which is [X]% of total Xbox MAUs over the same period. Fortnite on xCloud performed worse than expected by Microsoft. Cloud gaming is currently unprofitable for Microsoft.
As a reminder, you can read the 111-page document in its entirety here, and the comment from ResetEra, who compiled the above information, can be read here (with links to specific pages in the document).
