There’s a certain level of mischief in claiming that GamePass is the reason why sales of many Japanese games are lower on Xbox compared to PlayStation and Nintendo. SF6 is also a puzzling addition to this list since Sony’s securing SF5 exclusivity and purchasing Evo has pretty much pushed the vast majority of fighting game fans to the console.
Mischief? How? It's just a factual statement. Just because SFV was a PS4 exclusive doesn't mean other Japanese fighting games were; outside of the super-niche ones, ALL the other big fighters that gen came to both platforms. Tekken, Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive were all on PS & Xbox. Even stuff like KOF were on Xbox IIRC. It's not like Japanese fighters were completely absent just because SFV was a PS4 console exclusive.
Also from what I've seen, even tho Sony co-own EVO, a lot of people in the FGC at least still prefer playing on PCs. If these games were still getting arcade ports, some would be playing there instead. And Sony owning a part of EVO doesn't prevent Microsoft from participating; in fact we just learned that MS themselves stopped hosting KI tournaments because they were afraid players would've expected a sequel!
To the claim that GP has suppressed sales of Japanese games on Xbox...well this is just another fact. If you broke down the initial 1 million sales of the latest Yakuza game globally, most were across PS5 & PS4 and, extrapolating from Steam data, most of the remaining sales were on Steam. Xbox probably accounted for less than 1/5th of that 1 million initial sales goal being reached. Potentially less than 150K, and this worldwide.
What was different from this last Yakuza game vs. others? It wasn't Day 1 in Game Pass. So the Xbox Game Pass owners who had been conditioned to expect Yakuza games in the service, decided to just not buy the new Yakuza at a high rate, since it wasn't in Game Pass. There are other examples too, like Soul Hackers 2 (another SEGA/Atlus game BTW), showing how Game Pass has mentally conditioned a lot of Xbox customers to buy less games, especially if they aren't in the service.
We also now have data showing that people are playing a big amount of older titles across all platforms. So why would this not be the case for Game Pass subscribers? If a new game isn't in the service, why wouldn't they just settle for something already in the service to play instead? And it'd seem, going by sales splits, the average Xbox customer is a lot more likely to do this than the average PlayStation or Nintendo customer (Nintendo customers being the least likely because there is no robust Game Pass or Playstation Plus-type service on Nintendo platforms, and no NSO+ doesn't count because those are
VERY old/retro games).
There’s certainly a reason you aren’t using the likes of Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy as an example.
I easily could, because even with those games Xbox's portion of sales was quite small and grew increasingly smaller over time out of the launch period. Have you seen some of the UK boxed charts? Multiple times, Hogwarts had less than 10%, even less than 5%, of its sales on Xbox. And before you say "well, there's digital!", in the UK we know now that among digital sales PlayStation has a bigger share than Xbox, as well. So on average, games are selling more digital copies on PS than they are selling on Xbox, and when you combine that with the physical software splits, 99% of the time the digital sales aren't enough on Xbox to make up the difference.
And if that is happening in the UK, one of Xbox's last strongholds, why would that not be happening to a similar degree in America (a market that has historically mirrored the UK in customer habits for gaming)? Why would it not be happening to even greater degree outside of those markets, where Xbox has historically struggled?
