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 inner evaluation reveals a [redacted]% decline in base recreation 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.
“While you put a recreation 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, ‘Effectively is not everybody simply going to subscribe for $10 and go play this factor?’ However no, players discover issues to play based mostly on what all people else is enjoying.” 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 companies on any platform, believing that “severely cannibalize B2P [buy-to-play] gross sales, notably within the case of newer releases.”
