As regular readers of gaming news know all too well, Wedbush Securities Strategic Advisor Michael Pachter is not one to mince words, always speaking his mind regardless. In 2018, he famously said loot boxes only existed because consumers were stupid. In 2022, he criticized Sony for vastly overpaying Bungie in the $3.6 billion acquisition, especially compared to Microsoft‘s acquisition of Activision Blizzard and Take-Two‘s acquisition of Zynga.
In the same year, he also prophesied that Xbox Game Pass active subscribers would blow up to 100 million when Activision Blizzard games were added, and literally doubled down on the prediction in 2024, when he said Game Pass could reach 200 million active subscribers in 10 years.
In a brief conversation with GamesBeat (available only to GB Max users) following the leadership change at Microsoft, Pachter has now completely modified his stance. To begin with, he wasn’t positive at all about the next Xbox console (which is currently targeting a tentative 2027 launch), and that’s precisely because of Game Pass.
I think the console is dead. I think they’ve already blown it with the console by embracing Game Pass.
Wasn’t Pachter pro-Game Pass? He was, but he appears to have changed his mind following the recent Game Pass restructuring (and price increase), which he strongly believes is the wrong model.
The problem with Game Pass was it was all or nothing. Give me 30 bucks a month or f*** you. You aren’t playing my games. Why wouldn’t you sell EA Sports FC to the 100 million people who would like to play it but don’t want to buy a console? Of course you should. I think that’s the ultimate solution, leveraging Microsoft’s game library, live ops understanding and cloud infrastructure to be like Steam, but for connectivity.
If they ever did that, I think it would work. I think the all-in on $30 a month subscription was the wrong way to go. The price should be $10 a month, all you can eat. Who’s going to pay for a buffet knowing it’s five times the cost of a meal? How can you make a business charging people $360 a year up front when a game costs only $70? They should have run it like a cafeteria. That’s their mistake.
He does have a point: Microsoft likely cannot have its cake and eat it, too. By pushing so heavily on Game Pass and the multiplatform strategy, they have decreased the value of owning an Xbox console, as shown by the console’s hardware sales over the last three or four years. But now, with the Game Pass price increase, they’ve also lost many subscribers who believe paying that much for the service isn’t really worth it anymore.
According to recent rumors, Microsoft might be looking to add more third-party and/or first-party services to make Game Pass Ultimate a more attractive proposition at $30, but it might already be too late to turn the ship.
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