A sprawling – and quite insightful – article about the current state of the games industry has been published by GamesIndustry.biz, featuring interviews with the likes of Circana’s Mat Piscatella.
But it’s former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden’s thoughts that are going viral, as he’s chimed in with his opinion about Xbox Game Pass.
As part of a larger discussion about game pricing, the veteran Sony suit said he believes subscription services with day one releases could be a “danger” and he likens the situation to Spotify.
He points out that music is basically worthless these days, but artists have an “adjacent market” from touring, so there’s still money to be made. The same doesn’t apply to games.
While he acknowledges there may be value in subscriptions for smaller developers seeking exposure – a Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, perhaps? – he believes creators could end up “wage slaves”, with little incentive to bring value to the market in the hope their project could “explode”.
He said:
“There’s a lot of debates going on. Is Game Pass profitable? Is Game Pass not profitable? What does that mean? That’s really not the right question to ask anyway.
You can do all kinds of financial jiggery-pokery for any sort of corporate service to make it look profitable if you wanted to. You take enough costs out and say that’s off the balance sheet and, oh look, it’s profitable now. The real issue for me on things like Game Pass is, is it healthy for the developer?
They’re not creating value, putting it in the marketplace, hoping it explodes, and profit sharing, and overages, and all that nice stuff. It’s just, ‘You pay me X dollars an hour, I built you a game, here, go put it on your servers.’
I don’t think it’s really inspiring for game developers.”
We’re sure these comments will end up extremely controversial, and there’ll be a lot of handwringing over them.
While we kinda get the point Layden is trying to make – is there still incentive for devs to overextend creatively and qualitatively when your product’s sales potential is intrinsically linked to the number of subscribers who’ve already paid for it? – we imagine most developers will disagree.
Ultimately, we think creatives want to deliver compelling products – and in some cases, guaranteed revenue may be a means of enabling them to do that.
But it’s clear, whatever Microsoft says, its subscription cannot support the size of its development network anyway – that’s pretty much the only reason you’re seeing it bring basically its entire library to the PS5 at this point.
We’re sure the debates will rage on and on, but Layden’s clearly not compromising his thoughts: he doesn’t like the concept of Xbox Game Pass, and we can’t imagine anyone’s going to change his mind.
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