Founder of Arkane Studios: "I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade"; impacts sales
Microsoft is literally killing off game studios and dev jobs to fund AI. There’s absolutely no way that customers don’t get fucked when the end goal of game pass is met. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Plus, since SKG is a trending topic, you think they’ll think twice about killing games exclusively under GP or just dropping them? You’re not even paying for the games, just access. I got it a couple times when it was $1. After it went up I realised “oh cool so my entire library would be hostage for future price hikes”. Fuck that.
Fawkes is doing this. An indie studio, Buying out IPs that have shutdown their service. They re-released Defiance back in April and it's been a huge success.
What is SKG?
Stop Killing Games, in short it's a campaign that's pushing petitions to force developers to keep games playable when currently if a developer is done with it they will just shut servers and there can be o way to play the games any more, or provide code for someone else to be able to set up a way for them to still be played.
Stop Killing Games
Gamepass is going to continue betting worse until we end up with the mess that are streaming services right now.
I sincerely hope it fails.
Exactly. Right now developers get good deals when adding their games to game pass and the game pass is pretty cheap, but after game passes become "the thing" and developers have to be in a game pass, it will get worse for developers and consumers.
It has plateaued some time ago now. That's not failure, but it's not about to become Netflix either.
Game Pass is the same scam as Netflix was back then, and I'm not falling for it twice.
Netflix used to be too good to be true as well. 10€ a month for literally everything ! Now they don't even make blu-rays anymore and you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch than watching it, so people are pirating again.
I'll stick to physical games and GOG as much as possible.
Can confirm, I never stopped pirating for 20+ years.
May as well enjoy it while it lasts. Like Moviepass.
you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch
justwatch is pretty reliable and can save you tens of hours on your search apparently
That may be true, but that wasn't the point he tried to make. The problem is that netflix used to have everything at a good monthly price and once they dominated the market, enshittification and price hike started, plus all the other companies wanted in on the action, starting their own service.
Now MS is trying to do the same to the PC gaming market.
So does sailing the high seas
Justwatch reliably tells me "this isn't available for streaming in your region". Sonarr tells me it's an AMZN Webrip and I can Just Watch™
Edit: But like, no shade on Justwatch, it works as intended. It's the streaming services who get worldwide licensing rights and then don't bother targeting my little region.
Sadly justwatch doesn’t work for me. It gives the choice between a part of the country that doesn’t offer services where I live, or another country - which doesn’t offer services where I live.
I love JustWatch. Gets you the exact info you’re looking for pronto.
Netflix used to be too good to be true as well.
So was Moviepass, but while they were operating it was a great deal for the consumer. I wasn't going to sit that out just because I could see that they were gonna run out of money eventually.
The proper consumer response to these types of models (get them hooked with a great value proposition and then try to squeeze them once they're in) is just to leave when things get bad. Subscribing to Netflix in 2013 doesn't mean that I had to keep subscribing through 2023. I could get the benefit of a 2014 subscription and reevaluate each year whether it was worth continuing.
I worked at BlockBuster back when Netflix came out. It was legit a great contender, and an awesome service. BB had their own mail service, but it was just seen as a copycat. Also the franchise had a LOT of bad blood, and sometimes rightfully so. Depended on local management how much leeway you could have. The most lax stores that were lenient did the best.
The reason it worked was because physical media is protected by the first sale doctrine. So if you could buy a disc, it could be under one roof as rentable inventory.
Streaming and licenses is what fragmented everything and greed gave the appropriate incentive.
It also somewhat killed direct competition. When everything was physical on a shelf in front of you, all for the same price, you had direct comparison and competition. You could have any show or movie from any studio all side by side. That $2-5 could get you anything, across the board.
I saw this all coming from miles away. I don't blame anyone, every step sounded like a great deal. I see a lot of the same things with Gamepass. It's a great deal, and I don't blame anyone for using it... But I don't see it as being a long term net positive for the industry.
Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don't care.
Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it's so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won't or can't think ahead
Absolutely. Every indicator available suggests Enshittification will hit the subscription models within the next few years.
What's "short" about the short-sightedness, though? I've been a Game Pass subscriber for something like 8 years and it's still crushing it as far as services go - probably moreso now than any year prior.
Will it last / remain a good deal forever? Nope. But nothing does/is. Might as well enjoy the great variety of games I'd never purchase (like Blue Prince, Arcade Paradise, Shipbreaker, South of Midnight, Expedition 33, etc.) along with the convenience of access to games I totally would pay for (like THPS 1+2, Gears, Diablo, etc.). Plus the built-in rewards subsidize like 1/4 of the cost.
When (not "if", when) they jack up the price to a point that's not worth the games or I don't have enough time to play to justify the spend, I'll just cancel.
If you had been buying games you'd have a library 🤷
What's "short" about the short-sightedness, though?
Gamepass attacks the developers, not the consumers.
i get the feeling gamepass gives you access to the library of games that my library has. fantastic if your library doesn't have video games or you have difficulty getting out of the house, but i love my local library
Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.
MS may not have invented it (although I'd argue they essentially did) but they did perfect it. That was the whole idea behind windows and IE, market share dominance at any cost.
We call it the Walmart model
They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.
I wouldn't be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there's a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that's at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that's revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they've built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.
Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.
How many times have we already seen this?
It's the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
We haven't seen antitrust with teeths for a while now.
Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple should have been broken up in a million little pieces a long time ago, but it won't happen.
The only part of the gamepass that is monopolistic is the friends network it creates.
One of the shit thing is that all the games that I've bought in the last 5 years all has come into game pass.
I canceled it when I canceled every other subscription except real debrid
The premise itself is flawed, of course Gamepass impact sales, that’s the whole point. The question is does it negatively affect profit? Well for AAA games it might, for AA and indies it might affect positively and those make up the bulk of the gamepass library. Matter of fact there’s barely any AAA games released on GP that aren’t Microsoft’s own games.
AAA and AA haven't meant shit in this industry for a long long time. It's not even almost something I look for when looking for something new to play.
Oh that looks fun, but the budget just isn't high enough for me, next.
They need to bring back demos. It would help a ton if they did, but it seems so many companies and devs just completely skip the idea. I think some of it has to do with companies who kinda know their games aren't going to be worth a fuck so they want people to buy at full price, so they're not going to release a demo. Same with not releasing the game to reviewers early.
I like indie games for walking sim and story heavy games only. Outside of that, 99% of indie games feel like some pixel art bs retro rip off roguelike nostalgia cash grab. I hate garbage ware like meatboy, etc.
If AAA studios weren’t so shitty, I feel like half of the indie studios wouldn’t have a chance.
I don't have a game right now. I spent the weekend searching Gamepass and testing out some games I wouldn't have bought blindly, trying to find my next obsession.
None have grabbed me yet. DOOM Middle Ages was starting to get fun but it kept crashing on me. Sorry developer's, if your game doesn't get my attention in the first ten minutes, you never deserved my money, but if I find the game on Gamepass and enjoy it, I tend to let others know.
For a healthy mega publisher/platform with a lot of fingers in the pot? It will increase overall profits and, theoretically, those profits can be redistributed. This is effectively what EA did in the late 00s/early 10s where Madden and The Sims meant games like Mirror's Edge (or... The Sims) could be created.
The problem being that once a few of the tentpoles collapse? it ALL collapses
Also, this ignores the companies that aren't part of that megapublisher who now are fighting "just play Halo or Call of Duty, it is free with gamepass". At best it creates an environment where it doesn't really matter how well a game sells so long as you sold N licenses to Humble and MS and Sony and so forth. Which effectively incentivizes "streamer bait" games.
Also: We have seen exactly this play out in music and film/TV.
But Gamepass is not even close to being a tentpole. Halo and Call of Duty being in Gamepass has not limited the ability of games like BG3 being huge successes. If anything it frees up people to buy these type of games because their yearly COD is included in their monthly fee and now they can budget to buy other types of games.
Isn't this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.
Except now it's just spyware
It is classic tech company strategy.
We saw it with Amazon offering suspicious deals for years on name brand stuff to kill competitors. Uber offering subsidized rides to kill taxis. Google Photos offering unlimited free storage
If it seems too good to be true, check under your feet and see if there's a rug there.
Of Microsoft? That's like business 101 my dude, and mostly why business schools should be burned to the ground. The system we have stifles innovation and promotes greed. We fucked.
I love renting games. Worked for me at block buster 🤷♂️.
I'm not very inclined to take at face value what a studio founder has to say about a service that might make them less money, and might save their customers money.
Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.
Yeah but on the other hand the dumping business model where you sell stuff below cost to kill competition has been a staple of Silicon Valley.
Amd I'd rather the studio earn more money than the publisher in any case.
Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.
Except for the hilarious number of studios owned by Microsoft. One would hope Microsoft takes the effect of Game Pass into account when they're reviewing sales figures and shutting down studios. One would hope...
Game pass might be the best deal in gaming, but you are selling your soul to the devil for it. It will ultimately harm gaming, especially developers long term. We should reject game pass.
Yet another example of:
C Suite / Upper Management doesn't listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they're being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.
The goal is to lose money to capture the market and once it is done, to recoup their loss and bleed the market dry.
Yes, but if they can't actually pull off the last part... uh... that doesn't end well.
Game Pass obviously and absolutely affects game sales. At the same time this conversation only happens because we're comparing "the industry with Game Pass" to "games at face value". That second one only lasted 10-15-ish years. Before that, there was "the industry with game rentals". Blockbuster was also absolutely eating up some sales.
But game rentals were often seen as a "try before you buy" case to many, as you may want to play a game more than 3-5 days. So maybe the answer is don't lease your game to Game Pass for a year at a time. Just offer it for a month or three. (Also make an easy way for the non-technical to export/import saves.) This also would let Microsoft make more deals for more games in their rotation. Seems like a shorter time helps everyone out.
Yeah, honestly, what was wrong with games releasing Demos?
I think a lot of games would do well if they also bundled limited demos of other games with them too like back in the old days.
Yeah, it used to be quite common for PC gaming magazines to include a demo disk, basically, here's the game and the first level or two, often you could fit a couple game's demo versions on one cd.
GamesPass could easily do something like uh... hey, this game here, you can play for 2 or 5 or 10 hours, and then if you want more, you can buy it with... I dunno, a 1/4 to 1/3 discount if you're subbed to GamesPass, and you've got the playtime.
I like how this prophecy was foretold a clean 1 week after this shit really went downhill. Who could've thunk Microsoft would be a shitty money grubbing removed?
Sooo... Gamepass is one of the services that is driving up the price of the non-gamepass versions of those games, right? They've got to recoup costs somehow, and then the rest of the industry takes that as an opportunity to consider these inflated prices as the new baseline.
Games are a lot more expensive to make now. While the tooling has improved, the cost of labor has risen-sadly not enough to keep pace with the cost of living. The cost of a game to the consumer is also a lot cheaper than it was in even the 90’s. So you have a lead gen strategy in gamepass that forces them to recoup in other areas but they still aren’t able to recoup enough. Because of political monetary policies which gamers don’t really want to think about, currencies are worth less (USD lost 7% this year already-$100 bill is now worth $93) and the game prices haven’t adjusted to compensate. In short, games are hitting a similar wall to movies where in a world with Netflix, everything is going to end up looking like mediocre trash if it has to be basically free.
The market has also increased 1000-times over, while simultaneously removing physical barriers entirely. The development itself is more expensive, sure, but distribution is way cheaper and the potential gains have increased at a much quicker rate, especially for smaller games.
This has been so obvious from the beginning, and now that it’s too late is when they starting to complain.
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn't as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn't killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the "wait for a sale" people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that's a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
I thought that was during Covid.
I'm honestly surprised that movie theaters even exist still. Motion picture groups basically starve the theaters to the point where they can only survive off of concessions. The places are almost universally dirty and understaffed. Most of the mom and pop shops died off decades ago.
According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.
Lots of others did it during covid though.
The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.
We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn't all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5...
And as an industry they return less than the sp500 so not only is movie viewing horrible, movie making is a terrible investment .
It stopped being just $1 and instantly became the worst thing ever. /s
Game pass is good for one month and playing like 3 single player games. But it’s really been the final nail, last gasp whatever you want to call it for XBOX. Its not sustainable, has stalled out and larger developers have had enough of getting f**** over.
backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
"But if you offer all these old games to play, why would anyone bother buying the new stuff?" - some corpo director
Is it as bad as the time Netflix killed the movie industry?
The movie industry is plenty capable of killing itself.
Maybe it says more about me than about game pass, but even at 5€ a month it would be significantly more money than I spend on games every year.
Not that I couldn't afford it, but I mostly play games that are at least 5 to 10 years old, either on second-hand physical copies or heavily discounted sales/keyshops. The most recent game I've bought is Elden Ring, even then only recently because I found a cheap physical copy.
is there anyone making any money from video games at this point?
Mobile gacha shit
Studios get gobbled up, mass layoff, explode and reform month by month.
If you manage to bottle lightning the studio makes a fuck ton of money, assuming you haven't already sold your soul to venture capital. (Hint, If it's more than two guys in a garage, they've already all sold their sole adventure capital)
What's a gamepass?
Instead of buying a license for a game for $70 you subscribe to a rental service that gives you access to 500 games for $10/month.
Or, instead of buying a $500 console or a $800 PC you just buy a $60 controller and you stream those games running on "the cloud" (=someone else's console) for $15/month
Problem is that the service is provided by Microsoft at a loss and when they'll get enough critical mass, they'll enshittify it.
The economic proposition is good, but I think it's just to teach gamers that "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy"
Game pass is awesome. Played a fuck ton of games at that price. Hope it stays forever, especially with that stacking model lol.
Hey, uh, is Uber still cheaper than a taxi?
Oh, no, it isn't, and also taxis, largely don't exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the 'consumer' option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.
Roughly the same business model there.
You're trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.
You definitely have a point... if US was the only country in the world and Uber did not provide a much better service than our local taxis. I mean yeah the local ones are cheaper but considering overall service, fuck no.
For me, one of the major advantages of Game Pass is publishers are absolutely refusing to put local regional pricing nowadays. Games at 60$+ cannot be bought by anyone with middle class salaries. Now with push to 70-80 usd+ for AAA, even AA games getting to 60$ it is impossible to buy in my country.
So why should I get a single game at those prices when I can get few hundred at similar pricing? It's MSs problem that they are willing to put their games day 1 on GP not mine. I don't care whether games are getting "devalued" or whatever, I'm simply getting what I paid for.
Also, people do tend to buy games standalone and I really can't see that going away honestly. I can't see games ever going subscription only or anything like that.
Hope it stays forever
Oh boy, have I got some news for you
I know, I know lmfao. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to leach the hell out of this until it goes away.
Wow, I totally missed the part where Microsoft had a gun to your head. Obviously sales go down when people don't have to buy the game to play it.
Why does Arkane suck so much now?
Wow, I totally missed the part where Microsoft had a gun to your head.
Yes. Microsoft is good at hiding that part until it's too late to do much about it.
The funniest thing is that I can guarantee that whatever numbers Deathloop did they would have been much worse without Gamepass. Great game, but not the kind of game that can have mass appeal.
Arkane sucks now because MSFT forced them to make the kind of game they did not have experience in making.
It's like hiring a plumber to fix your electrical problems, hiring a car mechanic to diagnose your skin condition.
This is the whole thing of large publishers buying out successful dev teams, then mismanaging the fuck out of them, then destroying them, by firing 1/4 of the staff, throwing another 1/4 all around their various other studios, then hiring a bunch of contractors for the remaining dev team to babysit / onboard for 6 months before they know how to do anything useful...
...all for a game that's either a castrated, mutated version of what the studio is known for, of course with latest trending corpo buzzwords a 'core features', or is just something wildly different from the studio's previous work.
This happens with extreme regularity in the history of the video game industry.
Almost like being rich is more likely to indicate someone is a pompous buffoon that takes credit for other people's successes and blames other people for their own failures, than it is to indicate they are some kind of Ayn Rand style entrepreneurial ubermensch, mr 'gonzo- rand 19'.