The popular Wedbush Securities analyst also talked about how long it would take for Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass subscription service (before Diablo IV got on it!) to reach 200 million subscribers, which he says doesn’t include members of the service tier that was renamed from Xbox Live Gold to Game Pass Core.

“Their Xbox Live Gold membership was 50 million. Their Game Pass membership was 25 million, and then when they changed the way they reported Core, it went down to 34. Why didn’t it go to 75? Why didn’t it go to 50? It didn’t because whoever was reporting that they were counting Xbox Live Gold members as part of Game Pass was reporting it wrong. Sorry. It’s just not true. Xbox Live Gold membership has not decreased. That’s not how they’re counting it.

When we start getting Activision Blizzard games, I expect subscriptions to pick up. I think Game Pass is going to be huge. I think it will be over 200 million subscribers. I’ve said I think it’s going to be 200 million in the next 10 years, and I’ll take that bet with anybody. I promise you I’ll pay for it to be 200 million in the next 10 years. They are that committed to it. I don’t think the new subscribers have dried up. The big acquisitions were really just Bethesda, which is starting to show some traction, and then Activision, which has no traction yet because the first title hasn’t come out. Come back and ask me in a year when they have Call of Duty.

Why are they bringing their exclusive titles to other platforms? The reason they’re doing it is because the Nintendo model and the Sony model of proprietary titles on proprietary platforms is the wrong model. It’s a broken model. Nintendo started it in 1985. It worked for 40 years. Sony emulated it in 1995 with PlayStation, Microsoft emulated it in 2001 with Xbox, and it worked for a long time and then it didn’t. Supporting your content by managing the distribution on your platform is like a movie studio owning a chain of theaters and the only way you can see their movie is in their theaters. Now, that will work and they will make money, but they won’t make as much money as they would if they distributed their movies in six or seven other ways.

Microsoft will have time-limited exclusives. They’re going to put some content on PlayStation and Switch, they’re going to put some content exclusively on Game Pass, and they’re going to tweak it and figure it out. When they bought Activision, they agreed with the regulators that they would do this, but they didn’t agree because the regulator said so. They were always going to do this. It wouldn’t have made sense to buy Activision and take Call of Duty off the PlayStation, they wouldn’t have sold as many copies of Call of Duty if they put it exclusively on the Xbox,” Pachter said.

Since then, we’ve heard that Xbox has become the top platform for Diablo IV, but it’s hard to see a major change in exclusivity. Sony releases its exclusives on PC, but often significantly later than on console. (MLB: The Show doesn’t count, it’s a baseball game.) And Nintendo fights the term multiplatform tooth and nail…

Source: WCCFTech