It’s clear, even to Microsoft, that something is broken at Xbox, and there are a million ideas as to how to fix it. If it’s possible to fix at all.
Old Xbox leadership has been cleared out, with a new team brought in to correct course. Though it’s pivoting an aircraft carrier with holes in the hull after a decade of questionable decisions, and the upcoming release of Fable is a summation of some of the most problematic ones. And it is almost entirely divorced from the quality of the actual game.
Fable combines two issues facing Xbox in one:
1) The somewhat recent position of allowing almost any game, including a storied IP like Fable with a new game 16 years in the making, to go to a competitor system like PS5. In this case, the very same day it comes to Xbox.
2) And how is it coming to Xbox? “Day One on Game Pass,” of course, the perceived main benefit of the subscription service where no one has to buy the game, so long as they’re paying the monthly/yearly fee. This is true for essentially every Xbox first party release, and has been for years.
The latter point has been a good deal for consumers, at least most of the time, depending on how many games you were planning to buy on Xbox that year, but the long-term hope of explosive Game Pass growth has not panned out for Xbox. After a huge surge in the COVID years, growth has stalled, and actually, reversed, after the terrible decision to increase prices by 50%. That was walked back by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma almost immediately, though not all the way, and with the caveat that Call of Duty games would no longer be day one on Game Pass.
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That’s a canary in a coal mine of things likely to come. It’s clear that Microsoft is starting to be unsettled by putting every big first-party game on Xbox Game Pass, which they are now doing with Fable, one of the biggest releases of this entire Xbox console generation.
The situation Xbox now finds itself in, however, is that Fable will be released for PS5 with early access just days after PlayStation drops its huge God of War: Laufey release, the rival shrugging at the prospect of stepping on the toes of a rival who is handing it its biggest game of the year, no questions asked. And on the Xbox side, what’s happening here? Drastically reduced sales because of customers already on Xbox Game Pass. Few new subscriptions added because of Fable arriving six years into the console generation. And no need for anyone to buy a box if they own a PlayStation.
There seems to be a clear path forward that the new administration will start pulling back the idea of handing over its biggest first-party games to PlayStation. I have to believe this gift to Sony would not have happened with Fable if that decision was being made today. But this is a separate, likely harder issue to parse when it comes to day one Xbox Game Pass releases, a situation that has now stuck Microsoft in the mud with that strategy driving few sales, few subscriptions and even fewer console sales.
The counterpoint, however, is that if you take day one away at this point when Game Pass subscribers view it as the main reason they have the service, you’re neutering that part of the business, even if it’s not growing. But you avoid the situation of every release being a blur, lumped in with any new Game Pass addition in any given month. A compromise here may be a delayed “free” launch on Game Pass, 6-12 months later. That’s what’s happening with Call of Duty, new games being added to Game Pass a year later, so there’s nothing to say that couldn’t happen with other big games. Like Fable. But it’s too late for that this time.
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