I also think Game Pass has been detrimental to game sales, but that’s why the metric has shifted to engagement rather than units sold. Maybe it’s a way to obfuscate the bottom line, I don’t know. This guy is definitely not the first to point out his disdain for Game Pass, and I don’t believe he’ll be the last.
But, to be fair, there are others still lauding Game Pass as very positive for their projects.
From the article:
“Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley recently claimed that launching into Xbox Game Pass had been “a huge success” for survival action game Atomfall.
“Microsoft has been a fantastic partner to work with, they’ve really leaned in to helping us,” he told GI.biz. “They brought their skills and their scale to bear on our small project, and it’s done really, really well for them, so they got a good deal, we got a good deal out of it as well.”
You can maybe argue that he’s only cheerleading GP because big daddy MS/Xbox is giving him the moneybag, and that is a very logical assumption. I think it’s fair to say that some games have been more ‘successful’ on GP than if they were being sold outright.
The “Game Pass Effect” has definitely conditioned some gamers to expect upcoming third-party games to land on the service rather than them having to buy the game. They are already getting that guarantee for the first-party games. That leads to a theory of mine where I think that this is one of the reasons that Xbox has closed a lot of their studios (in addition to trying to fund their AI initiative). Xbox is losing so much money guaranteeing their first-party games day one on GP that they’d rather shut down the studios than release the games. Like I said, it’s just a theory. But like all good conspiracy theories, it sounds like it could be true 😊
