Some Xbox Studio Leaders Reportedly 'Detest Game Pass' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted 15 hours ago / 1,998 Views
Bloomberg's Jason Schreier speaking on the Triple Click Podcast has claimed there are Xbox studio leaders that "detest Game Pass" and believe it has ruined the value of their games.
"There are a lot of people out there in studio leadership within Xbox who absolutely detest Game Pass," said Schreier. "[They] think it has destroyed the value of their games, think it has taken away the value from all games in general and has been a detriment to the games industry in those people's view, because of how it devalues games."
A former Xbox studio lead that remained anonymous told Windows Central something similar.
"Giving games away for 'free' in Game Pass from day 1 sends a message to consumers that the games don't have inherent market value. It almost creates an assumption that these titles could not sell on their own," said the former Xbox studio lead. "It felt like a race to zero."
Another former Xbox lead revealed Xbox uses an engagement formula to allocate profits form Xbox Game Pass to the studios. However, some studio figures feel this isn't transparent and aren't motivating for the studios as bonuses historically have been tied to sales figures rather than "engagement" metrics.
Senior Director and Video Game Industry Advisor at Circana Mat Piscatella on social media has responded to these reports stating, "the data suggest Game Pass' negative impact on sales is overestimated and overblown by many, much as was the case for both piracy and used games before it. The important insight here is the [Microsoft] does not appear to have clearly laid out the formula for compensation.
"The more pressing driver isn't people paying money for a sub service (the games are not, as one source noted, 'free') but the established live service, often f2p behemoths. So now, Game Pass is going to be deemphasized, which makes me wonder what the new excuse for game underperformance will be.
"Anyways, studio leads often think games will sell multiple times any reasonable benchmark, and will tend to blame any external factor possible for poor performance while often hoarding credit for any success. Human nature, whatever. But not exactly unbiased folks when it comes to this stuff.
"And no, you can not just multiply the number of Game Pass players of a game by the full MSRP of that game and say that the result of this math were sales lost to Game Pass. Although people sure love to quote that awful piracy math.
"Game Pass can not be, at the same time, this incredible, giving-away-games free demand destroyer as well as a service that hit a subscriber cap, failed to drive a significant Xbox Series installed base and allowed for games like Forza to be ported to PlayStation and sell massive numbers."
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 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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From best deal in gaming to the biggest mistake in gaming. What a wild gen.
GamePass - for the consumers, not for the corpo suits.
Its completely understandable. The consumer perspective is all we can really see from. And from that side it IS a great deal of more games than anyone would ever want to play for a low monthly fee.
We can speculate that the developer side find it rather insulting. Taking what amounts to their creative works and reducing them to a bargain bin just so the service can see the MAU instead of actual sales.
There is a happy medium here though... IF both sides can agree. Management would need to change the service to a window instead of everything everywhere all at once. Meaning that games that will be released to the service would have an opportunity to generate sales first. Lets say... 6 months (as an example). interested consumers would have that window of opportunity to buy the games and play them before GP users would get their chance to play in the service. That sounds like a fair compromise. It allows the studios to see what sort of demand their wares bring in.
Right now the $15/month tier gets day one games a year or so later. The $23/month tier gets day one games (minus CoD). When they increased it to $30/month to get all day one games millions of people unsubbed. I'm subbed to the highest tier as there are more than enough day one games to make it worth it. If I wasn't subbed the vast majority of day one games I'd either wait for a sale or just never pick them up.
Edit: 1 thing Xbox does is premium upgrades for Game Pass games that tends to give the premium upgrade option and 5 days early access. Maybe if they were to delay some games from being day 1 they could then charge Game Subs per game in order to get them day 1.
Almost like something looses value when it attained for free or really cheap
I could relate this to many things in modern society but bite my tongue lol
You dont own the game on GamePass. Thats the difference
'Detest Game Pass'. Is that more or less than they detest their own customers?
Well Microsoft detests Xbox
