A few days ago, Pete Hines, the former vice president of Bethesda Softworks, had criticized gaming subscription services like Microsoft’s Game Pass as potentially harmful for the developers and now Shannon Loftis, former Xbox Game Studios VP has supported his comments, affirming the popular subscription based system creates “inner tensions” among developers.
“As a longtime first-party Xbox developer, I can attest that Pete is correct,” Loftis said. “While GP can claim a few victories with games that otherwise would have sunk beneath the waves (Human Fall Flat, e.g.), the majority of game adoption on [Game Pass] comes at the expense of retail revenue, unless the game is engineered from the ground up for post-release monetization. I could (and may someday) write pages on the weird inner tensions this creates.”
One of the biggest problems of subscription based services such as Microsoft’s Game Pass is that it prohibits gamers from actually owning their games which completely takes away all sense of freedom they can have over the contents. This omission of ownership is a glaring issue in these services and a part of Hines’ comment last week was targeted specifically at this aspect:
“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.”
Former PlayStation exec Shawn Layden had also pointed out that even though the services may be profitable for the platform, it may not be as helpful for the developers themselves: “The question is not, ‘Is the service profitable for the platform, ‘Is it healthy and helpful for the developer’ is what we need to ask.”
However, Game Pass continues to be a majorly profitable outlet for Microsoft which declared back in June that the service has hit a total revenue of $5 billion.
