This why I believed subscription serviced wouldn't become the predominant model of accessing games. You need time to extract the value needed to maximise the cost of the service. And that's on top off the time spent on ala cart purchases.
That's the funny thing though, people typically don't view small recurring payments the same as larger lump sum payments. While they'd never say so outright, I'm sure MS would love it if GP started to take on an oversized portion of it's subscribers gaming time, as that makes MS more competitive in that area.
Also a 3% increase in revenue of consoles sold doesn’t mean they sold more consoles. Didn’t MS up their prices somewhere during the year? If so, it means less consoles sold but a tiny revenue increase because of the price hike.
Yikes, bad take alert. These figures are for the quarter not the year and XSS/XSX were $150/$350 for much of the holiday season (much more aggressive pricing than last year). LOL
Plus it's factual knowledge that December was their best month in units for the system in the US (according to NPD or whatever they are calling themselves now).
Really, anything entertainment wise that takes up people's time is competition. Its just not a direct industry competition, but time is still time.
Absolutely, literally anything else is competition for time. The Covid bump was just never going to stick for that reason, weird that so many of the companies in the industry acted as if it would.