I remembered Papa Phil's previous whining that they lost the most important generation ie. the one where people accumulated their digital libraries. It doesn't actually make much sense in the context of Game Pass though, because I thought a selling point of Game Pass is that you get a digital library of something like 400+ games handed to you? It ought to make the 'muh library' argument kind of irrelevant.
All of that is just deflection though and all roads lead back to the main hurting point for Xbox: the games. More specifically, the hot new exclusive games (because let's face it, no one is going to be subbing to Game Pass just to mirror a games library they already have). I don't know just how often that needs to be said, but gamers (literally) aren't buying what they are selling.
Several of their releases have ranged from the mediocre to the downright rotten, and MS also bizarrely view putting one first party game per quarter on the service as a good metric. You aren't going to get people to consistently subscribe month on month with a drip feed of content like that. The main draw to the service should be quality and quantity experiences you cannot find elsewhere, especially when they own so many studios now.
As for some of their games coming to other platforms, you can understand it from a bean counter perspective. Reach more people = sell more games = get more money, after all. But you get the impression that this is just a short term cash grab that will harm their brand in the long term. Game Pass loses more exclusives, further reducing the incentive to subscribe to it. Why bother when you can just wait a year and get it on PS5, or sub for just one month a year and blast through all 4 of those amazing games they put out (lol)?
Game Pass could've been like a stockpile of exclusives which built up value over time for Xbox, eventually tipping the balance to make people a subscriber. I can picture the consumer now: "You know, there's a lot of games now on GP that look good that I can't get elsewhere... maybe I will get an Xbox this Black Friday and subscribe". Now that idea is being eroded.
