If he was already a subscriber, why would he buy the game? If he kept his sub up for 6 months, he could have played and beaten GOW, Detroit and Spiderman, all for $60.
People get gifts or trials for stuff all the time. My friend doesn't even consider games he gets from PS+ to be his. He's basically the average Era user when it comes to "owning" games, so he doesn't really subscribe with his own money to these things unless gifted or if he's using the service like a trial (which is what he'd have done if God of War had been in a Game Pass service. He'd have dropped a few bucks for a month of the service just to see if he liked it and then bought it to own later.
I'm actually surprised (not that surprised :P) at the general vibe around here about this kind of data since everyone here usually beats the "I like to
own my games" drum. It's not that surprising to me that there is a large chunk of people who would simply never use Game Pass on principle to participate in the hobby, and therefore the people that
will use Game Pass are just helping market games to the former group (and paying $10 a month to do it!).
I'll take my own situation with Forza Horizon 4. We heard that it sold very well. In my case, I have a rule that I won't buy any game at launch (ever) and I won't buy any game for its asking price (no matter what it is). It's how I save money, and keep a more manageable backlog. But I did snag over a year of Game Pass around E3, and will probably continue to do so with my MS Rewards credits (can get a month of GP in less than a month so basically the service is free to me). I've been streaming it, talking about it, etc... since it came out. I got 2 friends to buy it (who don't use Game Pass since they're all "I like to
own my games" ). And at no point did this cannibalize a sale since I wasn't going to buy it anyway at launch. And then later when they eventually take it off the service (as I'm sure they'll have to eventually, I assume?), I'll buy it because I like Forza games and will want to have it around.
MS made more money off of my situation than they would have without GP. And apparently according to
literally every person with data including independent data people like Mat, my situation isn't a rare one. Are there people using GP to replace purchasing full games they would've bought otherwise? Sure. I have no doubt about that at all. But all signs seems to show that people like that are rare, and are offset by people who wouldn't have purchased games actually going out and purchasing games because of GP (either their own sub, or more likely a friend's).
