Industry Journalist Says Xbox Game Pass Does Increase Premium Sales, But Mainly on PS5

Former GamesIndustry.biz journalist Christopher Dring (I’m currently contributing to VGK again, you like to see it) says this is one of the unexpected benefits Xbox’s Game Pass subscription, at least for Sony, is that some additions to the service could have a “major impact” on PlayStation sales.

In Industry Q&A InstallBase Forum (Thank you, power unit), Dring was asked what he thought about the impact of subscription-based Game Pass on the premium gaming market. He said this could be a bit of a double-edged sword, hurting big blockbusters like Indiana Jones and the Big Circleand, paradoxically, increasing PS5 sales. Expanding on the topic, he explained:

“Anecdotally, games on Game Pass could lose about 80% of expected premium sales on Xbox. This is the number that is called. It’s lower if it’s a major mass release, but overall… look how low it is Hellblade 2 are plotted on the map. Or where Indiana Jones came from. Or even Star field. Game Pass has clearly hurt sales of these games on Xbox. But… if it’s a multi-platform game, it might be useful. This growth in the number of players on Xbox could have a strong impact on sales on PlayStation, for example.”

However, Game Pass certainly plays a role in expanding the types of games that the average subscriber is exposed to in a given year, which Dring admits: “What we know from the data is that there are a lot of people who only play Call of Duty. And if some of those people decided to get Call of Duty this year through Game Pass, and those same people took the opportunity to play some other Game Pass games, games they wouldn’t otherwise play… it’s hard to argue that that’s a bad thing. thing.”