Outer Wilds Developer: Subscription Services Are Going to Impact the Games Industry Very Significantly - News

Tweet

Outer Wilds developer and Mobius Digital co-creative lead Loan Verneau spoke about Outer Wilds and the video game industry with GamesIndustry at the Montreal International Gaming Summit in November 2019.

Outer Wilds was the first game to be crowdfunded on Fig, was an Epic Games Store exclusive and launched as an Xbox One console exclusive, and launched on Xbox Game Pass.

"We're on Game Pass for Xbox, and it's been really awesome because I think it's brought a lot of players to the game who would not have known about it otherwise," he said. "So I think that's been a big shift. The same way it's changed the TV and movie worlds, the subscription system is also going to impact the game industry very significantly. We're starting to see that, and starting to see it maybe unlock the market to weirder things and more original things that would have been more risky beforehand."

"My personal take is that for any industry, it's all a question of monopolies," Verneau added. "And our industry is filled with monopolies on so many levels, from tools to platforms. And I've learned enough economics to know what that means and to think it's a really problematic thing for both players and game developers.

"As long as we manage to break these monopolies and have competition at every level, I think we'll be fine. Whether or not we can get there? Monopolies are very good at making people think they like it, because they have all the money to put on marketing. That's my personal worry. For as long as we have competition between platforms, publishers, and distributors, game developers will [be able to reach our audience].

"It's always a risk. Convenience is the new bane of our existence, I think. And I'm as guilty as anyone, but knowing that our short-term convenience hurts us in the long-term and being able to take that step [away from convenience] -- and being able to teach people to take that step -- is going to be a fight for sure."

Outer Wilds is available now for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC. 

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.

More Articles