‘The Tension Is Hurting a Lot of People’: Ex-Bethesda Boss Speaks Out on Subs Like Xbox Game Pass

If there’s anyone best placed to speak on the impact of Xbox Game Pass, it’s ex-Bethesda boss Pete Hines, who left the publisher in 2023.

Hines enjoyed a wildly successful 24 years at the company, and so he saw first-hand the consequences of Microsoft’s acquisition.

And while he admitted that he’s been out of the picture for a little while now, he said he saw some “short sighted decision making several years ago” which “seems to be bearing out the way I said”.

Here’s the full quote from DBLTAP, as part of a wider interview which also touches on PREY, The Elder Scrolls, and much more:

“I’m not working in any of these companies anymore, and so I don’t assume that everything I knew while I was in the industry still holds true today. At the same time, I’m involved enough to know I saw what I considered to be some short sighted decision making several years ago, and it seems to be bearing out the way I said.

Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can’t buy a product anymore. When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don’t figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content – without which your subscription is worth jack sh*t – then you have a real problem.

You need to properly acknowledge, compensate and recognise what it takes to create that content and not just make a game, but make a product. That tension is hurting a lot of people, including the content creators themselves, because they’re fitting into an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding what they’re making.”

Ex-Sony executive Shawn Layden recently made similar comments on Xbox Game Pass, arguing that it’s turning developers into “wage slaves”. He was quick to share Hines’ comments on social media, saying “Pete’s quote nails it”.

Despite a ton of discussion on the topic, Microsoft has always insisted that its subscription is profitable. Although it’s gone through various price increases and adjustments over the past few years, and the company obfuscates its actual profits.

PlayStation, to its credit, has consistently said it believes the Xbox Game Pass model is unsustainable. Earlier in the generation, the organisation was put under a lot of pressure to copy the business model.

It eventually introduced multiple tiers of PS Plus, which provide a rolling catalogue of releases, including some day one games. However, it’s always resisted the temptation to devalue its own software in the service upon release.

Industry-wide subscription spending has been up in the US recently, but it remained stagnant for several years, despite price increases.

Ultimately, we think it’s probably safe to say that while Xbox Game Pass does represent great value, it’s not the future of gaming, as was hypothesised at the start of the generation.