Halo Infinite is a trial balloon for Game Pass' future | Opinion
Rob Fahey
Contributing Editor
Friday 28th January 2022
The resuscitation of Microsoft's ambitions in the games sector after the missteps and failures of the Xbox One era have all revolved around one seriously ambitious goal: reshaping the industry's business models to move away from fixed hardware platforms and generations, and towards a vision of an evolving software and services platform that spans various kinds of hardware and systems.
Between the expansion into a service platform spanning Xbox consoles (the hardware itself now fragmented into two distinct performance tiers, making it easier to expand even further in future) and PC platforms, and the creation of the Game Pass service, which now boasts 25 million subscribers and a hugely impressive back catalogue of games, most of the framework for achieving that goal is in place.
There's just one missing ingredient, and it's the single biggest challenge for Microsoft in the coming years: it needs the high-profile exclusive games that will actually tip consumers over and get them to buy into this ecosystem.
The general assessment that Microsoft is now spending significantly more on content than Netflix is a fair one
That's what last year's acquisition of Zenimax / Bethesda was about, and to a large extent it's what this year's vastly larger -- in every sense -- acquisition of Activision Blizzard King is about. Once you factor in all of the company's other various investments in first-party studios and the costs associated with actually integrating its two publisher acquisitions, Microsoft's investment in getting its first-party publishing pipeline up to speed in this generation will likely be within a stone's throw of $100 billion.
That's easily the largest investment any
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