Former chairman of PlayStation Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden has sharply criticized gaming subscription services in the vein of Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass as downright harmful for not just the industry but for the developers as well.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Layden has compared gaming subscription-based services like Game Pass with music subscriptions services such as Spotify and Apple Music which have significantly reduced the overall number of physical music sales.
“I’m not a big supporter of the ‘Netflix of gaming’ idea,” Layden stated. “I think it is a danger. I mean, look what happened to music. In the popular mind, music costs nothing. Music should be free. Spotify, what is that? It’s 15 bucks a month or something, but virtually no one buys music anymore.”
He explained that unlike musicians who have touring as an alternate way of generating revenue, game developers have no such route to rely on and can only depend on game sales.
“The problem with gaming is all we have is launch,” Layden said. “That’s it. No one wants to pay money to come into the studio and watch people code.”
Layden also questioned Microsoft’s stance on Game Pass as a profitable option in the long run where he has asked for whom is it actually profitable for, the publishers or the developers themselves?
“Is Game Pass profitable? Is Game Pass not profitable? What does that mean? That’s really not the right question to ask anyway,” he said. “You can do all kinds of financial jiggery-pokery for any sort of corporate service to make it look profitable if you wanted to. You take enough costs out and say that’s off the balance sheet and, oh look, it’s profitable now. The real issue for me on things like Game Pass is, is it healthy for the developer?”
He also compared developers launching games on a subscription service as turning into “wage slaves”.
“They’re not creating value, putting it in the marketplace, hoping it explodes, and profit sharing, and overages, and all that nice stuff,” Layden said. “It’s just, ‘You pay me X dollars an hour, I built you a game, here, go put it on your servers.’ I don’t think it’s really inspiring for game developers.”
It’s not the first time where Game Pass has been called out as last month Arkane Studios founder had also blasted the service as an “unsustainable model” that has been damaging the industry for nearly a decade.
