I don’t totally buy the infra cost argument for high-utilization users as the driving factor behind price changes. Cloud compute is cheap, and Microsoft likely also owns the entire Azure-based stack it uses to deliver Game Pass.
If anything it feels more like rug-pull tactics similar to what you describe for Amazon - low costs initially bring in users, then prices slowly rise over time once people are bought in to the platform.
I also don’t know specifics, but the difference in cloud cost behind running premium titles and lower end titles is likely nominal, but I could be wrong. This is just to say “high utilization” users playing lots of low end games likely use similar resources to people who play high end games, so if the issue was infra cost it would make sense more to segment by “number of digital game rentals” or similar instead of by tier of game itself.
I was also surprised by that note. The actual cloud server costs for one more CoD enthusiast is pretty small.
I suspect they found that subscribers who played a lot of CoD were probably getting a lot of value out of game pass. Maybe they played a lot of different games and saved money. Maybe many of them subscribed for 2 months, played a ton of CoD, and then cancelled. CoD was clearly providing a large portion of the value of the bundle, so they upped the price
Yeah I think it’s very much more of a “price this to make more money off of the people that are low-attachment people that only play major releases of first party games” or something instead of acting as if a AAAA title’s value prop is the same as a small indie and pricing them effectively the “same”.
I don’t totally buy the infra cost argument for high-utilization users as the driving factor behind price changes. Cloud compute is cheap, and Microsoft likely also owns the entire Azure-based stack it uses to deliver Game Pass.
If anything it feels more like rug-pull tactics similar to what you describe for Amazon - low costs initially bring in users, then prices slowly rise over time once people are bought in to the platform.
I also don’t know specifics, but the difference in cloud cost behind running premium titles and lower end titles is likely nominal, but I could be wrong. This is just to say “high utilization” users playing lots of low end games likely use similar resources to people who play high end games, so if the issue was infra cost it would make sense more to segment by “number of digital game rentals” or similar instead of by tier of game itself.
I was also surprised by that note. The actual cloud server costs for one more CoD enthusiast is pretty small.
I suspect they found that subscribers who played a lot of CoD were probably getting a lot of value out of game pass. Maybe they played a lot of different games and saved money. Maybe many of them subscribed for 2 months, played a ton of CoD, and then cancelled. CoD was clearly providing a large portion of the value of the bundle, so they upped the price
Yeah I think it’s very much more of a “price this to make more money off of the people that are low-attachment people that only play major releases of first party games” or something instead of acting as if a AAAA title’s value prop is the same as a small indie and pricing them effectively the “same”.