Microsoft bet 80 billion that you would play hundreds of titles. It failed because you just wanted to play the same old game.

I have dozens of games in my library. Do you know how many I play? to two: from time to time I play a FIFA (I’ll always continue to call it that, I’m afraid) and if I get around to it I’ll hit the old ‘Battlefield 1’ that still has me conquered.

In recent years I have enjoyed ‘Ghost of Tushima’, ‘Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’ or ‘Sifu’, for example, but while I was spending hours on those half a dozen titles, many others that I have in my library are simply collecting dust.

Surely many of you play many more games and invest much more time in this, and Microsoft was surely thinking of you when it configured its future strategy.

Xbox’s ambition was great until it wasn’t

The idea in 2020 was clear, and those responsible for Microsoft said that There were 2.8 billion gamers in the world and they wanted to conquer them all. As? Well, with two great projects:

1. Spend a million in buying video game development studios to constantly grow the catalog, and, of course,
2. Create the ‘Netflix of video games’ with Xbox Game Pass

Both ideas seemed to make a lot of sense and many gamers, especially those of us who were from Xbox, felt excited by that ambition. Xbox Game Pass seemed to be really exceptional for gamers and a nightmare for Sony, and although the operation to buy Activision Blizzard and franchises like ‘Call of Duty’ It was exceptionally expensive.the play again seemed like a fantastic bet for players of all types.

But lo and behold, it wasn’t. These days we have known that Microsoft has spent close to $80 billion on agreements that would give it access to titles such as the aforementioned ‘Call of Duty’ or ‘Skyrim’, so that these video games could be available from day 1 or almost from the first moment on Xbox Game Pass. They wanted to create a catalog that would allow gamers to play hundreds of titles, including the most recent “triple A” titles, as part of the subscription to that service.

They were wrong. And we also thought that the idea made sense.

less is more

The truth is that the strategy has not worked out well for them. The company has announced that will lay off 3,200 employees in its Xbox division20% of its staff, and will also allow five development studios to leave the company to follow their own path again.

Maybe the answer wasn’t having more games. Steam already gave a strong clue at the beginning of 2025 when it pointed out that its platform It had become a video game dump.: Of 19,000 titles in 2024, almost no one played 80% of them.

As in many other areas, the long tail theory prevails: interest is concentrated in a handful of contents that, on their own merits (perhaps seasoned with some luck) become absolute successes.

The reality for the vast majority of gamers is the same: there are too many games on the market and people simply don’t have time to play all of them. Let’s be handsome or uglyWe insist, there is no time for so many video games.

My colleague Jose García wrote in 2021 his particular reflection on how many we have become new digital Diogenes When it comes to video games: we get countless new games (most of them free) on Epic Games, Steam or GOG, but we have them collecting virtual dust in our library because we will never play many of them. My situation was also reflected in another text by Isra Fernández: Being a gamer after having children is complicated.

The Netflix of video games was a utopia

The picture that this situation paints for us is one that we intuited and made sense, but that we deceived ourselves by rejecting. Creating the Netflix of video games was impossible because video games are radically different to series or movies.

While one consumes series or movies once and abandons them probably forever, gamers return to the video games we like again and again. We don’t spend an hour or two on them, but dozens and even hundreds of hours both in solo games and in games against other players on the internet.

The way of consuming both content is precisely what destroys the illusion that a Netflix of video games makes sense. Xbox Game Pass offers us hundreds of titles so we can try them (and buy them) if we want, but we rarely do.

I myself enjoyed Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for three years, and although I tried around twenty titles during that time, I always ended up returning to my classics. The options were wonderful, but I just didn’t have time for them. because when I wanted to play, I wanted to go back to my FIFA or my ‘Battlefield 1’.

Microsoft itself already accused the problem when it gave us the worst news two years ago by raising the price of Xbox Game Pass. That was not enough, because a few months later he uploaded it again. The service was becoming more exclusive than ever, and it was doing so for one simple reason: they weren’t making enough money with it.

But there is another problem that It is not just about consuming, but about producing. The “Netflix rhythm” is also unviable: there four scriptwriters start writing and in six months the platform releases a series that people devour in a weekend. In video games things are different, with increasingly longer and obscenely expensive developments.

The famous availability of games available on “day 1” does not help either. That AAA video games worth 70 or 80 euros are available for free to subscribers was wonderful for us, but a shot in the foot for the company’s accounts. Building loyalty was important, but that was killing income for developments like these in which a lot of time and money is invested.

The conclusion is clear in retrospect: Microsoft’s strategy was fantastic for gamers, hundreds of games available at the price of a very affordable subscription was a dream come true for the most intensive gamers, but neither they nor the rest of us wanted to realize the reality.

There was too many games and too little time to play them. The equation couldn’t work.

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