Microsoft has hinted that it's a financial success already.

It's probably the gym membership model. Developers get money for actual time played. The market of users that just play from time to time and don't really care about the 10$s is probably substantial.

I fall into this category. I only really get an urge to play every few months. And unless there is some specific game I'm interested in, I just pick something from the Gamepass catalogue, which is already pretty substantial. (it has/had great games like RDR2, GTAV, Witcher 3, Subnautica, No Mans Sky, ...)

While cancelling the subscription and then re-subscribing when needed is actually pretty smooth (re-subscribing takes just 2 button presses), I don't care enough to do it.

And all the "idle" revenue probably allows Microsoft to play decent rates to publishers, so they actually incentivized enough to put their games on the service.

I'd be curious to know what kind of impact that $10/mo/user would have compared to the traditional game sales cycle from a revenue stream perspective.

Say that the system has a current-gen lifespan of 5 years and users run their subscription throughout the duration of the service, that's $600 per user assuming no price increases. I don't game nearly as much as I used to, so that would cost me way more than I've spent the last several years on games.

The shitty thing about a model like this is that I can't just power the system on after 6 months and just play without turning the subscription back on.

1 - They'll break the sub out into tiers.

2 - Netflix is around the same price - a big enough market smooths it out.

3 - The press release defines their market as 3B people. I wouldn't be surprised at all if their internal business cases target 1B+ people.

Netflix has something like 150,000,000 subscribers. $10-15/mo adds up quickly.

Think of how many people have Netflix that don't even use it. They want to get Game Pass to the point where it's a de facto standard that a gamer has Game Pass.

Maybe $10/mo towards games from studios they own is more profitable than $10/mo towards games from elsewhere?

I would assume there are more people who would pay $10 a month ($120/year) for access to all of these AAA games than there are people who buy >2 new AAA games a year (~$120/year). Thus, roughly speaking, it should be profitable. There is ~0 marginal cost for a customer playing a new game