The massive growth of Game Pass brings some surprises to developers

Game Pass was pretty big last month, but even from that perspective, the last two weeks have been massive. Microsoft and Xbox’s subscription service continues Katamari’s journey through the gaming industry, earning titles at a rate that is actually beginning to approach the famous “Netflix of Game,” a buzzword that makes at least a bouncing decade don’t listen so much now that, well, it could be here.

It’s been boiling for a while, but recently it’s moving fast. First came the fall of Bethesda: after Microsoft completed the acquisition of Zenimax Media, the service got 20 massive games at a time, from retro gems like The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind to current blockbusters like Doom Eternal and dear critics Disgraced 2 i Dams. Then the announcement of the next looting Outriders would be released on Game Pass on the first day, followed by an announcement of some of the most beloved games such as Undertale, Octopath Traveler i Nier Automata, all surprises in themselves. Finally, for a good measure, we got the long-awaited drop of EA Play on PC. In the short term, it is clear that this thing is not reduced.

The value of Game Pass for the consumer is quite simple: don’t pay that much money, you get an absolute amount of games. For the industry, things are a little more complicated: subscription services at this scale are still relatively new in the gaming world, but other sectors offer us some scenarios of how things might go. It seems that the world of television and film is moving fast to gain mastery of subscriptions, and while there are many more prestigious television and True Crime documentaries on a high budget, cinemas are a little less than happy. how everything is going. In the world of music, subscriptions are widely regarded as catastrophic: it will be difficult to find a musician who talks about Spotify in the most ridiculous terms. A viral tweet from E3 2019 briefly summarizes some of the precautions surrounding the whole idea:

However, almost four years after the Game Pass experiment, things are already shaking in a different way than they had in those other industries. I spoke with British developer Codemasters, which makes the DiRT series of racing games and has been involved with Game Pass since day one, before its recent acquisition by EA. For the vice president of publishing, Jonathan Bunney, it has not yet been a major change in the industry: like so many disruptive developments in the past, it is just one more facet of a constantly growing space, bringing new things to the table without supplanting the old ones. uns. He sees it as an additive experience, “one of the many tools in the arsenal of the modern game publisher,” he says.

“We see it as a way to extend the life of our games and attract players who would not necessarily buy the game. speaking as a consumer. I find myself discovering games I’ve never heard of, or games I’ve heard of, but I’m just not willing to spend $ 60. “

Bunney says Game Pass has been a great way to find new fans and grow games in the U.S. market, where Xbox is stronger, and he believes it generally helps players’ sales through Game Pass.

For Microsoft’s Sarah Bond, one of the main differentiators between Game Pass and the subscription services that have come to dominate the video and music industry is that it stays connected to the Xbox Live retail store and therefore the relationship between playing subscription and buying games is fluid in a way that is not replicated for other services.

“When you subscribe to a channel that allows you to watch a video, like Netflix,” he says, “this is the end of the monetization cycle you have with this content. In games it’s the opposite: there are items you can buy in the game. , there are extensions you can buy, there is a next franchise you can buy, there are other genres you can jump to “.

On average, according to Bond, Game Pass subscribers spend 20% more time playing, playing 30% more, playing 40% more genres, and most importantly, spending 20% ​​more on games in general. That could always change if Game Pass and other subscriptions become a bigger part of the industry as a whole, but Bond stresses that there is still plenty of room for overall growth, especially since Xbox is linking its streaming services to Game Pass.

“There are 200 million people who buy a console and there are 3 billion people who play,” he says. “Today, many of these people do not have the option to play many of these amazing experiences and iconic games that you see. When you really look at what we do with Game Pass, we are making it possible by linking it to the subscription and putting our broadcast on the subscription. We are able to make the economy work from all this. ”

Mike Rose, founder of No More Robots, was cautious when the subscription train began running. The company publishes some strange and esoteric titles, of the kind that many concerned initially might have gotten subsumed by the continued growth of services like Game Pass. Narrative-based game developers, in particular, were concerned that a metrics-based approach to titles in subscription services might begin to favor addictive multiplayer titles over single-player titles. With four games in service, however, he has been pleasantly surprised by the support for a wide range of titles.

“It was a concern for me a few years ago, now I care less,” he says. “With them signing Outside of hypnospatial law i Prophet nowhere, games that certainly do not adapt very well to the model of passing of game and that are a little niches and strange, alleviates a little my worries because it seems that they want his diffusion of games ”.

All No More Robots games have had a different experience when it came to Game Pass. Multiplayer game online Descendants, he says, was perfectly tuned to the service, and exploded as soon as it fell in terms of both overall gameplay and traditional sales, which he said quadrupled.

“The effect we see is people playing Game Pass, they tell their friends,‘ Come play this game with me ’, they don’t want another subscription, so they’re going to buy the game. We end up getting a lot of players in Game Pass and we also sell a lot of them ”.

We’ve seen the same effect on Sony’s PlayStation Plus service titles, which aren’t as expansive as Game Pass, but which still gives away games for free. Rocket League is the key story there, where a massive infusion of free players at the launch resulted in a long and successful release as a premiere multiplayer title, but we’ve recently seen similar stories with titles like Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout or Bugsnax, both released for free on PlayStation Plus.

Other No More Robots titles like the dreamcape police simulator and the late 90’s internet ode Outside of hypnospatial law the card fighter Prophet nowhere they were not as well equipped as Descendants, but still saw lower sales hits. Kingdom Management RPG Yes, your grace reached service at the launch of the Xbox Series X and, as a result, experienced a larger increase.

“The most important thing for us is that sales didn’t go down,” Rose says. “You worry about doing the thing for free and no one will buy it anymore: that didn’t happen.”

Game Pass is firmly in its growth phase, when it has a great incentive to be generous for both gamers and developers, and while gamers are still adapting to the idea. When asked if she cares if this dynamic will change in the future, Rose adapts a fairly typical position of indies in any creative space: “I care about everything,” she says.

While recent years seem to have largely allayed some of the concerns of the industry at large toward these services, developers remain agile and respond to an industry that tends to go through several seismic changes over a decade. On the part of Rose, he points out that players simply approach their purchasing decisions differently from other sectors, which for whatever reason (the high commitment people can make to individual titles is the likely culprit) just because something is free doesn’t mean players don’t pay for it.

“We have so many people who tell us that they bought their games, in addition to playing them on Game Pass. Other people say they feel like owners if it’s just in Game Pass. So buy it! That, to me, seems crazy! ”