Founder of Arkane Studios: "I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade"; impacts sales
from Pro@programming.dev to gaming@beehaw.org on 06 Jul 10:00
https://programming.dev/post/33436466
from Pro@programming.dev to gaming@beehaw.org on 06 Jul 10:00
https://programming.dev/post/33436466
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You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy
game rentals have their place
Mostly only because games are so expensive when they don’t have to be.
Just be thankful they haven’t followed inflation of both the value of money, and their budgets. A $40 NES game would be $120 in todays money and it was probably made in a month by three people in a shed, meanwhile something like CoD Black Ops Cold War credits over 9000 people and had a budget of $700 million. GTA 6 has already blown past a billion.
In fact, video games are currently pretty much the cheapest they’ve ever been, comparatively speaking.
Maybe indie games. Certainly not AAAs though.
bootlickers and corpos always roll out this argument while ignoring the growth in players meaning you get more sales
Yep, that’s why the best selling games consoles with the largest user base for selling all those super expensive AAA games are all the modern ones, like the Playstation 2, Nintendo DS, the Switch and the Gameboy Colour.
Most games today are cross platform and sell substantially more copies that old console games. Mega Man 3 for example sold just over 1 million copies and was a great success. GTA V, crossplatform AAA, sold almost a quarter of a billion copies.
That is part of the reason why i have never purchased it. Financially, selling Gamepass does not make sense, as the prices does not justify the buy-in to get a substantial amount of Games onto it, making it worthwhile. For Microsoft it only makes Sense, when they see additional Profitpoints Like the closed Market on it and Killing competition. Once that is done, the quality and amount of Games going to Gamepass will certainly worsen.
And we do Not need to forget that Microsoft is a Data Company. So by requiring the Gamepass service be installed onto your machine, they certainly get a load of Data about you from it. Which neither benefits the Game developers nor the consumers.
As for the Points of “Low barrier to entry, Games trying Out Games” - duh, thats what Demos are for
This is absolutely a case of getting in, killing the competition, then jacking the price and tanking the quality.
And because it’s a service, despite using it for years and paying all that money into it, as soon as you leave you have nothing. All those games are just gone.
I think from the game development side there are pros and cons. There are games that struggle to demand a high enough sticker price that do better under a subscription service.
The problem is that, much like subscriptions elsewhere, these are deliberately underpriced and used as a loss leader to sink competitors and the direct purchase market, so they aren't priced reasonably and it's unclear what the money flow towards creators is supposed to be.
And it'd be one thing if the money was flowing at all, but in the current industry, with Microsoft shedding people left and right while holding a ridiculous amount of IP, both active and inactive... well, it's not a great look for the industry as a whole to be dumping content below cost for the sake of a speculative move. And to make matters worse, I don't think that many people know just exactly how much of a money pit Game Pass is.
And that's before the more fundamental issues with ownership and preservation. Which I have strong feelings about, it's just that they happen to be so strong that I'm typically the one to remind people you don't own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
Hell yeah, he’s 1000% right
The spin of it being positive for indie is absurd. Indie thrives on PC, not Xbox.