To say that the Xbox Game Pass has been debated endlessly over “what it really provides” and such is an understatement. In fact, even with its obvious advantages to players regarding how they have access to a large plethora of games for a low, flat rate, it doesn’t cover up the fact that the service itself may be a money pit and dangerous to developers who buy into the program. The latest person to weigh in on this is former PlayStation head Shawn Layden. He revealed in a chat with GameIndustry.Biz that he was more focused on how things were going for the developers themselves than the money aspect of it:
“You can do all kinds of financial jiggery-pokery for any sort of corporate service to make it look profitable if you wanted to. You take enough costs out and say that’s off the balance sheet and, oh look, it’s profitable now. The real issue for me on things like Game Pass is, is it healthy for the developer?
They’re not creating value, putting it in the marketplace, hoping it explodes, and profit sharing, and overages, and all that nice stuff. It’s just, ‘You pay me X dollars an hour, I built you a game, here, go put it on your servers.’ I don’t think it’s really inspiring for game developers.”
He’s not the first person to note that or wonder just how “valuable” the Xbox Game Pass service is to people outside of gamers.
Case in point, recently, there have been questions about how many people have actually “bought games” versus just played them on things like Game Pass. Even key Xbox exclusives haven’t gotten full-on sales numbers at times, and instead, have revealed how many “players have played the game,” which is not the same in the least.
Another thing to note here is that while Game Pass keeps getting touted as something “special” by Microsoft, even leading to the “This Is An Xbox” marketing ploy, the actual subscribers for the Game Pass aren’t as robust as you might think. As of right now, the high end of the subscriber spectrum is about 40 million, and that’s important because the Xbox Series X/S hasn’t even sold 30 million, which highlights how many are using the service for things like PC and Xbox One rather than the new console.
Furthermore, despite Game Pass “doing well,” Microsoft has gone multiplatform with many of its exclusives, and that’s not something you’d do if something like Game Pass was “raking in the money.” Finally, several developers, including previous “Game of the Year” winning Larian Studios, straight-up avoided the Game Pass and merely let their epic RPG stand on its own, and the results spoke for themselves.
