When it comes to Game Pass, it was recently under some heavy fire from Sony Interactive Entertainment head Jim Ryan. I’m sure you are all aware of the current FTC trial going on right now with Microsoft. This all stems from the purchase of Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft bid a whopping $69 billion for. Of course, with this trial going on, some interesting comments and documents surfaced online for Microsoft. For instance, we learned that Microsoft was interested in acquiring Square Enix before moving on to Activision Blizzard. One of the comments that made headlines recently was Jim Ryan’s view of Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass subscription service.
If you didn’t catch the news, Jim Ryan made a bold claim stating none of the publishers liked Game Pass. It was a subscription model that Jim Ryan was scrutinizing, and to make a broad claim that Microsoft didn’t have any publishers backing this service, it was only a matter of time before people came out. One of them spoke up about their views on Game Pass through Eurogamer. Recently, the publication posted an interview with Miles Jacobson, the studio head of Sports Interactive, which Sega owns.
Miles had nothing but positive things to say during the conversation about Game Pass. In fact, Miles credited services like Game Pass and Apple Arcade as they helped turn over even more players for their Football Manager franchise. Specifically, the studio noted that they saw double the amount of players for Football Manager 2023 when they released the game on the mentioned subscription services.
Every studio has to make decisions themselves, but I don’t recognize some of the quotes that I see from other studios, and depositions. I don’t recognize that in our business. It’s all very sunny for us.
Miles Jacobson – Eurogamer
With more players enjoying this game, the development team saw audiences grow on other platforms, including PlayStation, which was doing much better than they previously expected. Of course, every development studio is going to be different, and it seems like throwing these games on services like Game Pass made sense for the studio fiscally, so we could see other developers and publishers popping up, also going against the previous statements made by Jim Ryan.
We were looking at games as a service… Game Pass and Apple Arcade are games as a service platforms that we’re in. So you’re learning a lot more about that audience as well as you’re going along. And there’s no way we would have reached five million players on FM23 without the audiences on those platforms – with PlayStation being an added bonus on top, because we’ve done much better on PlayStation than we were expecting.
Miles Jacobson – Eurogamer
In other news regarding Game Pass, it was recently unveiled that Microsoft would be raising the prices. The prices would only rise slightly for the two tiers available, which are Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate. Additionally, we learned that specific markets would see the rise of the Xbox Series X console platform.
