The UK Competitors and Markets Authority’s provisional report on the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition contains an admission from Microsoft that placing video games into its Sport Go subscription service cannibalizes gross sales of these titles. GamesIndustry.biz experiences: “Microsoft additionally submitted that its inside evaluation reveals a [redacted]% decline in base sport gross sales twelve months following their addition on Sport Go,” the CMA famous in its report. That affirmation runs counter to claims Xbox head Phil Spencer made in 2018 that Sport Go boosts gross sales reasonably than undermines them.
“Once you put a sport like Forza Horizon 4 on Sport Go, you immediately have extra gamers of the sport, which is definitely resulting in extra gross sales of the sport,” Spencer stated, including, “You say, ‘Nicely is not everybody simply going to subscribe for $10 and go play this factor?’ However no, players discover issues to play primarily based on what everyone else is taking part in.” Elsewhere within the CMA’s report, it cites Microsoft as saying that Activision took a dim view on placing its titles into multi-game subscription providers on any platform, believing that “severely cannibalize B2P [buy-to-play] gross sales, significantly within the case of newer releases.”
