Game Pass’s massive growth is bringing some surprises to developers

Game Pass was pretty big last month, but even from that perspective, the past two weeks have been huge. Microsoft and Xbox’s subscription service continues a Katamari-esque journey through the gaming industry, collecting titles at a rate that is actually starting to approach the legendary ‘Netflix of Game,’ a buzzword that has been around for at least a decade, but you can’t hear it so much now, well it could be here.

It has been cooking for a while, but lately it has been going fast. First came the Bethesda drop: After Microsoft completed its acquisition of Zenimax Media, the service got 20 massive games at once, all from retro gems like The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind to current blockbusters such as Eternal fate and critical darlings such as Dishonored 2 and PreyThen the announcement that would-be looter Outriders would be launched on Game Pass on day one, followed by an announcement of some more beloved games like Undertale, Octopath Traveler and Nier Automata, all surprises in themselves. Finally, for the record, we got the long-awaited drop from EA Play on PC. In the short term, it’s clear this thing isn’t getting any smaller.

The value of Game Pass to the consumer is quite simple: don’t pay that much money, buy a lot of games. For those in the industry, things are a bit more complicated: subscription services on this scale are still relatively new to the world of games, but other sectors give us some scenarios of how it could go. The world of TV and movies seems to be evolving rapidly to complete the subscriptions dominance, and while many more high-budget prestigious TV and True Crime documentaries are coming out, movie theaters are a little less happy with how it all happens. In the music world, subscriptions are widely considered catastrophic: you’ll be hard-pressed to find a musician who talks about Spotify in the most derisive of terms. A viral tweet from E3 2019 briefly sums up some of the caution surrounding the whole idea:

Almost four years after the start of the Game Pass experiment, things are already shaking differently than in those other industries. I spoke with UK developer Codemasters, who makes the DiRT series of racing games and was involved with Game Pass from Day 1, before the recent EA takeover. For Vice President of Publishing Jonathan Bunney, it has yet to be a major change in the industry: like so many disruptive developments in the past, it is just one facet of an ever-expanding space, bringing new things to the table without replacing the old . the ones. He sees it as a complementary experience, “one of the many tools in the modern game publisher’s arsenal,” as he puts it.

“We see it as a way to extend the life of our games and bring in players who wouldn’t necessarily buy the game. speak as a consumer. I find myself discovering games I’ve never heard of, or games I’ve heard of but just aren’t willing to spend $ 60. “

Bunney says Game Pass is a great way to find new fans and grow games in the US market, where Xbox is stronger, and believes it has generally helped sales on top of the players through Game Pass.

For Sarah Bond of Microsoft, one of the main differences between Game Pass and the subscription services that have come to dominate the video and music industry is that it continues to tie in at the hip with the Xbox Live store, and thus the relationship between subscription play. . and game purchasing is fluid in a way that is not replicated for those other services.

“If you subscribe to a channel that lets you watch a video, like Netflix,” she says, “that’s the end of the revenue cycle you have with that piece of content. in-game, there are add-ons you can buy, there’s another franchise you can buy, and there are other genres you can jump into. “

According to Bond, Game Pass subscribers spend an average of 20% more time playing games, playing 30% more games, playing 40% more genres and, crucially, spending about 20% more on gaming overall. That could always change as Game Pass and other subscriptions become a bigger part of the industry, but Bond emphasizes that there is still a lot of room for overall growth, especially as 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 games,” she says. “Today, many of those people don’t have the opportunity to play many of these great experiences and iconic games that you see. If you really look at what we do with Game Pass, we make that possible by linking that to a subscription and putting our streaming into a subscription. We are able to make the economy of all that work work ”.

Mike Rose, founder of No More Robots, was cautious when the subscription train first started rolling. The company publishes some weird, esoteric titles, the kind that many were initially concerned about, perhaps suppressed by the continued growth of services like Game Pass. Developers of story-based games, in particular, were concerned that a metrics-driven approach to titles on subscription services would tend to favor addictive multiplayer titles over unique single-player titles. However, with four games on the service, he was pleasantly surprised at the support for a wide variety of titles.

“I was worried a few years ago, now it’s less of a problem,” he says. ‘Sign with them Hypnospace Outlaw and Nowhere a prophet, games that arguably don’t fit that well with the game pass model and are kind of niche and weird. It kind of eases my concerns because it seems like they want to distribute their games. “

All No More Robots games have had a different experience when they played on Game Pass. Online multiplayer game Descendants, he says, was fine-tuned for the service, and it exploded as soon as it declined, both in terms of general play and traditional sales, which he says quadrupled.

“The effect we see is that people play on Game Pass, they say to their friends, ‘hey, come play this game with me’, they don’t want another subscription, so they just go and buy the game. We end up getting a lot of players on Game Pass, and we’re selling a lot too. ”

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

Other No More Robots titles like Dreamscape Police simulator and late 90s internet ode Hypnospace Outlaw or card fighter Nowhere a prophet were not as well set as Descendants, but they still saw smaller sales bumps. Kingdom Management RPG Yes, your grace hit the service around the launch of the Xbox Series X and saw a larger increase as a result.

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

Game Pass is firmly in the growth phase, when it has tremendous incentive to be generous to both players and developers, while still allowing gamers to adapt to the idea. When asked if he is concerned about whether this dynamic will change in the future, Rose takes a fairly typical stance of the Indies in any creative space: “I worry about everything,” he says.

While some of the industry’s broader concerns about these services seem to have largely eased in recent years, developers remain nimble and respond to an industry that tends to go through several seismic shifts in a decade. As for Rose, he notes that gamers just approach their purchasing decisions in a different way than in other industries, that for whatever reason – the high level of commitment people can give to individual titles is the likely culprit – just because something is free. doesn’t mean gamers won’t pay for it.

“We get so many people telling us that they bought their games and played them on Game Pass. Other people say they feel like they don’t own it when it’s only on Game Pass. So they buy it! That seems crazy! “