Former vice president of Bethesda Softworks, Pete Hines, has sharply criticized gaming subscription services such as Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass as potentially harmful for not just the industry but for the developers as well. And though he admits that his retirement from the Microsoft-owned Bethesda kind of makes some of his perspectives not as up-to-date, he does state that he had witnessed what he “considered to be some short sighted decision making several years ago” which weighs heavily on his view on the effect of game Subscription services in the industry today.
“Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can’t buy a product anymore,” Hines said. “When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don’t figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content – without which your subscription is worth jack s*** – then you have a real problem.”
According to him, subscription based services create a lot of pressure on the developers and even end up “hurting a lot of people” which totally goes against what should happen in the industry.
“You need to properly acknowledge, compensate and recognize what it takes to create that content and not just make a game, but make a product,” he elaborated. “That tension is hurting a lot of people, including the content creators themselves, because they’re fitting into an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding what they’re making.”
Gaming subscription services are becoming largely divisive as Former chairman of PlayStation Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden had also called them out as negatively impacting the industry a few weeks ago, and in July Arkane Studios founder had also blasted Game Pass as an “unsustainable model” that has been damaging the industry for nearly a decade.
With so many industry figureheads speaking out against gaming subscription services it’s becoming clear that there needs to be some kind of change to balance out the negative effects currently caused by these business models.
