The talk of video game subscription services has come from many different places over the last week or so. You might remember an article we wrote yesterday about statements Ubisoft made about gaming subscription services in the wake of their upcoming Ubisoft+ service. But the “king” of such services is easily the Xbox Game Pass. The point of the service is to make scores of games available to players for just $10 a month. Plus, some games will be “day one releases” of significant gaming titles. Microsoft has been quick to tout the success of their service, but how well is it really doing?
IGN did a big piece on the Xbox, Microsoft’s role in trying to “evolve the gaming ecosystem,” and more, and they touched on Xbox Game Pass and how its growth isn’t as big as you might think. After consulting some industry analysts, they discovered the service had a 13% increase in 2023. That doesn’t sound bad until you hear that 2022 had a 15% increase. So, the adoption rate is falling. Currently, it stands at just over 33 million subscriptions, which, again, doesn’t seem bad, but when you compare that to the system sales of the Xbox Series X/S and other consoles, you’ll see the disparities that arise.
For example, the Xbox Series X/S hasn’t even sold 33 million units combined since its release in 2020! So that means that many of the numbers come from PC users or previous Xbox One users. That’s not the kind of “growth” that Microsoft needs to tout.
That’s why there is confusion about whether this is the “future of games” or just another attempt to make something seem important when it’s not. While Ubisoft may think that the future of games features players “not owning the games they play,” others, like the head of Larian Studios, are already fighting back against the concept.
They feel that if everything is tied to subscription services, then gamers will lose some of their freedom with gaming. Plus, Larian Studios felt that it would give developers less of a chance to make good content because you would need to make something that would solely appeal to the subscription model.
It’s worth noting that even movie/TV subscription services aren’t doing as hot as before, with just about all of them raising their prices and putting in ads everywhere, where the point of having those services wasn’t to have ads at all.
