Industry analyst Michael Pachter was once a vocal defender of Microsoft’s gaming roadmap, but a recent shift in the company’s leadership has prompted him to radically reconsider his stance.
Michael Pachter, a strategic advisor at Wedbush Securities, is once again making waves in the gaming world. Known for his unfiltered and often provocative commentary, Pachter has never shied away from controversy: in 2018, he famously suggested that loot boxes existed “because consumers are stupid,” and in 2022, he criticized Sony for “grossly overpaying” $3.6 billion for Bungie—especially when compared to Microsoft’s massive Activision Blizzard acquisition and Take-Two’s purchase of Zynga.
At the time, Pachter was a staunch advocate for the Xbox Game Pass strategy, forecasting that the service would reach 100 million subscribers once Activision Blizzard’s titles were added. He later doubled down on this optimism in 2024, suggesting the platform could scale to 200 million active users within a decade.
However, in the wake of recent corporate restructuring at Microsoft, the analyst has undergone a total about-face. In a recent discussion with GamesBeat, Pachter declared that “the console is dead” and argued that the company has already “missed its window” by banking so heavily on Game Pass. In his view, this aggressive subscription-centric model has fundamentally undermined the potential for the next generation of Xbox hardware, which is rumored for a 2027 release.
Despite his previous support for the service, the recent overhaul of subscription tiers and rising costs have soured Pachter’s outlook. He now characterizes the “all-or-nothing” pricing strategy as a mistake, claiming that high monthly fees are alienating the core audience. According to Pachter, instead of pushing a premium $30 monthly bundle, Microsoft should have maintained a more flexible, $10 “buffet-style” entry point to keep the service accessible and appealing.
Pachter contends that the relentless focus on Game Pass, coupled with a shift toward multiplatform publishing, has stripped away the primary reasons to own an Xbox console, a trend clearly visible in recent hardware sales data. At the same time, the rising cost of the subscription has led to a churn of users who no longer view the service as the industry’s best value proposition.
Source: iXBT.games