According to Moon Studios CEO Thomas Mahler, one of the reasons why Xbox Game Pass had failed to grow as much as it could, is cause of it’s lack of top tier games, which led to many players unsubscribe from the service. The director of the Ori franchise recently provided a detailed criticism of Xbox Game Pass, even comparing the popular subscription service with communism:
“And that’s the crux of the issue: You’d need the Xbox folks to deeply, fundamentally understand gamers and what they want. They’d need to understand what’s a good game and what’s a mediocre game. And they’d need to have good deals with devs so developers are actively incentivized to produce massive hits, not just slop out mediocre content like a factory.
Gamepass in some ways is a little like Communism. And just like with communism, if you don’t give people a strong incentive to roll up their sleeves and go the extra mile, they won’t. And if you then don’t get the quality you need, it all comes crashing down cause players will not pay up unless you basically force them to by making content that’s so good that they feel like they miss out if they don’t check it out.”
Also, the problem with subscription services is that they place too much control in the hands of the companies and almost none to the actual players and if services like Game Pass continue to become even more successful with moves like these, there could be a time when the megacorporations who control the videogame industry decide to make the entire medium run solely on subscriptions which means players would lose all control over their games altogether.
There are other reasons why subscriptions services aren’t nearly as great as the companies would have us believe, and here are some of them as spoken by Former chairman of PlayStation Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden and the former vice president of Bethesda Softworks Pete Hines.
Xbox will be undergoing huge layoffs in next month which can result in closures of acclaimed studios such as Ninja Theory, Double Fine and Compulsion Games.
