It's funny listening to 12 year old logic that the subscriptions won't work because $60 is more than $10. Leave the numbers to Nadella and Hood.
Yeah, the obsession in gaming circles around units sold is weird to me. For film enthusiasts, nobody uses tickets sold as a real metric. It's all about revenue. If a movie moves 50 million tickets for a dollar, that's still not good! (relative to the budget at least).
Games used that metric reliably because 95% of games were released for usually the same price, and since the sales fell off a cliff after the first month for most titles, units sold wasn't a bad way to estimate a game's success. But these days, it's sketchy at best. Subs, DLC, merch from streamers pushing the game, etc... There's a million ways to monetize a game now beyond "sell as many copies as possible for $60 at retail in the first month or we go under."
You know how despicable mobile games are in general
I mean, Pokemon Go is a mobile title, and it's arguably one of the best Pokemon games in my opinion. It's certainly a lot more social, which was a main theme of the series going back to Gameboy Link Cables. Doesn't hurt that the game is wildly successful despite "hardcore gamerz" acting like it's a dead game.
Probably true. You have to have an advocate in the room and gaming never did at MS until Phil got promoted.
I think the gears were at least turning when MS updated their logo for the first time. They made Xbox (and gaming) a part of it and conspicuously left Windows Phone off of it, at a time when they were still justifying that division publicly.
But yeah, when Satya got in there, it was a huge turnaround for the company. And not just in gaming.