The massive growth of the Game Pass brings some surprises to the developers

Game Pass was quite big last month, but even from this perspective, the last two weeks have been massive. Microsoft and Xbox subscription services continue the Katamari journey through the gaming industry, earning titles at a rate that is beginning to approach the fabrication of “Netflix of Game,” a keyword that has been around for at least a decade, but you don’t. you hear just as much now that, well, he might actually be here.

It has been boiling for some time, but has recently been moving fast. First came the decline of Bethesda: after Microsoft completed its acquisition of Zenimax Media, the service received 20 massive games at once, from retro stones such as The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind to current blockbusters as well Doom Eternal and dear critics like Disgraced 2 and Prey. Then the announcement that the next robber Outriders would be released on Game Pass on the first day, followed by an announcement of more popular games such as Undertale, Octopath Traveler and Nier Automata, all surprises in itself. Finally, for good measure, I got the long-awaited drop of EA Play on PC. In the short term, it is clear that this is not diminishing.

The value of the Game Pass for the consumer is quite simple: you don’t pay that much money, you get an absolute ton of games. For those in the industry, things are a little more complicated: subscription services on this scale are still relatively new in the gaming world, but other sectors give us some scenarios on how things could go down. The world of television and film seems to be moving fast to complete subscription dominance, and while there are many more high-budget TV documentaries and True Crime documentaries, cinemas are a little less excited about how it all happens. In the world of music, subscriptions are widely regarded as catastrophic: you’ll find it hard to find a musician who talks about Spotify in any of the most derived terms. A viral tweet from E3 2019 summarizes some of the caution that briefly surrounds the whole idea:

However, almost four years after the Game Pass experiment, things are already shaking up differently from what they had for other industries. I spoke with the British developer Codemasters, which makes the DiRT series of racing games and was involved in the Game Pass from day 1, before the recent acquisition by EA. For Jonathan Bunney, vice president of publishing, this has not yet been a big change in the industry: like so many disruptive developments in the past, it is just a facet of a growing space, bringing new things to the table without replacing the old ones. He sees it as an additive experience, “one of the many tools in the arsenal of the modern game publisher,” as he puts it.

“We see it as a way to extend the life of our games and bring in players who would not necessarily buy the game. speaking as a consumer. I discover games I’ve never heard of or games I’ve heard of, but I’m just not ready to spend $ 60. ”

Bunney says the Game Pass was a good way to find new fans and develop games in the US market, where the Xbox is more powerful and believes it has generally helped players sell through the Game Pass.

For Microsoft’s Sarah Bond, one of the major differences between Game Pass and subscription services that has come to dominate the video and music industry is that it stays close to the Xbox Live retail store and thus the relationship between subscription gaming and buying gaming is fluid in a way that is not reproduced for other services.

“When you subscribe to a channel that lets you watch a video, like Netflix,” she says, “this is kind of the end of the monetization cycle you have with that content. In games, the opposite is true: 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 games, playing 30% more games, playing 40% more genres, and crucially spending about 20% more on games. general. This could always change if Game Pass and other subscriptions become a larger part of the industry as a whole, but Bond points out that there is still room for overall growth, especially as Xbox links its streaming services to Game Pass.

“There are 200 million people who buy a console and there are 3 billion people who play games,” she says. “Today, many of those 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 the Game Pass, we make it possible by connecting to the subscription and streaming the subscription. We are able to save everything that works. ”

Mike Rose, the founder of No More Robots, was cautious when the subscription train started running. The company publishes some strange, esoteric titles, the kind that many worried initially could have obtained subsumed by the continuous growth of services such as Game Pass. Narrative-based game developers, in particular, were concerned that a metric-based approach to subscription-based titles might begin to favor single-player multiplayer titles. With four games in service, however, he was pleasantly surprised by the support for a wide range of titles.

“It was a worry for me a few years ago, it’s less a worry for me now,” he says. “It simply came to our notice then Hypnospace Outlaw and Nowhere Prophet, games that undoubtedly do not fit very well with the passing model of the game and are a kind of niche and strange. It eases my worries a little, because it seems that they want to spread the games. ”

All No More Robots games had a different experience when they hit Game Pass. Online multiplayer game Descendants, he says, was perfectly adapted for the service and exploded as soon as it fell in terms of both the overall game and the traditional sales, which he says he quadrupled.

“The effect we see is that people play on the Game Pass, they tell their friends, ‘Hey, come and play this game with me,’ they don’t want another subscription, so I’m just going to buy the game. We get a ton of players on the Game Pass and we also sell a ton. ”

We’ve seen the same effect for titles on the Sony PlayStation Plus service, which isn’t as expansive as the Game Pass, but still offers free games. Missile League is the fundamental story out there, where a massive infusion of free-to-play players has led to a long and successful launch as a multiplayer title for the first time, but recently we’ve 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 internet ode from the late ’90s Hypnospace Outlaw or book fighter Nowhere Prophet they were not as well prepared as Descendants, but still saw lower sales swellings. Kingdom Management RPG Yes Your Grace hit the service around the launch of the Xbox Series X and as a result saw greater growth.

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

Game Pass is firmly in its growth stage, when it has a huge incentive to be generous both players and developers, and while players still adapt to the idea. When asked if she cares if this dynamic will change in the future, Rose adapts a fairly typical position of Indians in any creative space: “I worry about everything,” he says.

While recent years seem to have largely calmed some of the industry’s broader concerns about these services, developers continue to be agile, responding to an industry that tends to go through several seismic changes over a decade. On Rose’s part, he notes that players simply approach purchasing decisions differently than in other sectors, that for whatever reason – the high level of commitment that people can bring to individual titles is probably the culprit – only just because something is free doesn’t mean players won’t pay for it.

“We have so many people who tell us that they bought their games and played them on the Game Pass. Other people say they feel like they don’t own it if it’s just on the Game Pass. So buy it! That, to me, seems crazy! ”