But there's nothing in this report to suggest GP subs took a hit at all. Circana said COD on Gamepass drove revenue increses and Nadella just said subs on PC are up 30%.
Well if it's not a sub drop for GP, then most likely software sales fell hard. Their ports, at least Sea of Thieves and COD, did well on other platforms, and PC. So I'm guessing 3P B2P sales fell off hard, and their 1P sales for games like Indiana Jones on Series S/X weren't all that good.
And where is the margin of error going to come from? If you are a publicly listed company and you're making 1-3% errors in calculating the amount of revenue you make then you're in big big trouble.
OK, maybe margin-of-error was bad wording. I just used it as a relative way of showing how 2% growth is "essentially" flat enough to be seen as effectively flat. It's just very easy for that gain to get wiped in three months time. There's no padding.
Or he's talking about the mid gen refresh pricing....
They don't have a current generation worth a mid-gen refresh TBH. Better to go ahead with 10th-gen hardware sooner, not later.
Plus if it's going to be PC-like in terms of modular upgrades and refreshes, going sooner won't be much a disadvantage. They can just iterate with more capable refreshes every 2-3 years base-wise (in addition to optional upgrades available for earlier base iterations).
Hardware revenue was $1.01 billion so only 1.2 million units would mean $842 per unit. I have it at 2.2 million which means $454 per unit, this also seems too costly per unit but consider that outside of the U.S the Series S & X are much more expensive which will drive up the price per unit.
My post might've been worded weirdly; the 1.2 million was just Series X, I was assuming a 60/40 split in favor of Series X. Ignored Series S.
But including Series S, yeah your number could be accurate if the split was 60/40. Maybe it was 70/30 favoring X, or 30/70 favoring S. Unfortunately we don't know because MS's data is obfuscated to hell.
But why would you suspect a subscriber drop? Let's say MWIII sold 5 million copies on Xbox and PC last year, which is extremely low balling, that is $350 million in sales. Let's say a 50% loss in sales to gamepass - that's $175 million. With only two months of gamepass sub since the launch of BO6 - any lost sale couldn't even been 50% accounted for by new subs just for BO6.
People were predicting a big loss in revenue because of BO6 going to gamepass but revenue actually increased marginally. There is a big revenue hole that got filled by *something*.
It got filled by PlayStation accounting for 64% of the sales.
Which means, if say it did say 5 million on Xbox/PC, then it'd had sold ~ 13.85 million with PS sales included. Which I guess is believable (unless other statements are out to suggest it was lower). But yeah, B2P sales on PS would have filled in for any such drop; more people on PS bought MW3 than BO3 the year prior.
