Microsoft has released their earnings report for quarter three, revealing that their profits for Xbox content and services have increased a whopping 34% this quarter.
However, the company has claimed to not have made a profit from selling the consoles themselves, suggesting that most of this profit is made from the sales of games. This led to an investigation on exactly how satisfied gamers are with the games they purchase from Xbox.
Using a list of the 20 best-selling Xbox One games, ManySpins.com used Metacritic’s user score to find out exactly what players thought of the games they had purchased. Metacritic’s user scores range from 0-10, with higher scores indicating better reviews from the gaming community.
According to ManySpins.com, the game with the most copies potentially wasted is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The game has sold a total of 8 million copies so far, but only 49% of players were happy with their purchase. This means about 4 million copies have been wasted.
Call of Duty (COD) games claim spots 2 to 5 of the most wasted games, with a grand total of nearly 13 million copies wasted between the four games.
Kevin Roos, expert from ManySpins.com said: “Many of Xbox’s games are £50-60 on release, so despite making a loss on the consoles, Microsoft generates a lot of income through the sales of games and gaming passes. It’s not surprising that their profits have increased during the pandemic with more people spending longer at home and less time commuting.”
He added: “Microsoft knows that they can sell their consoles for a loss and still make money, especially if they keep bringing out new consoles meaning gamers have to purchase new versions of their games to continue playing.”
How was this research compiled?
ManySpins.com used Wikipedia’s list of ‘best-selling Xbox One games’ to find the 20 best-selling video games on Xbox One.
They then searched each game on Metacritic to find the user score for each game, specifically the Xbox One editions.
ManySpins.com then ranked the games from best to worst based on their Metacritic user score to find which best-selling Xbox Ones games players were most disappointed by.
Number of copies potentially wasted was calculated by multiplying the games’ total sales from Wikipedia’s list by the percentage of negative reviews on Metacritic. These are approximate values only.
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