This has been so obvious from the beginning, and now that it’s too late is when they starting to complain.
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Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.
MS may not have invented it (although I'd argue they essentially did) but they did perfect it. That was the whole idea behind windows and IE, market share dominance at any cost.
They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.
I wouldn't be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there's a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that's at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that's revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they've built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.
Game Pass is the same scam as Netflix was back then, and I'm not falling for it twice.
Netflix used to be too good to be true as well. 10€ a month for literally everything ! Now they don't even make blu-rays anymore and you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch than watching it, so people are pirating again.
I'll stick to physical games and GOG as much as possible.
May as well enjoy it while it lasts. Like Moviepass.
Can confirm, I never stopped pirating for 20+ years.
Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don't care.
Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it's so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won't or can't think ahead
Absolutely. Every indicator available suggests Enshittification will hit the subscription models within the next few years.
I thought subscriptions were enshittification, you mean it gets even worse?
Riding the subsidized waves until the point of enshittification and then dumping it faster than a hot turd is what makes the shareholder cry
Game Pass obviously and absolutely affects game sales. At the same time this conversation only happens because we're comparing "the industry with Game Pass" to "games at face value". That second one only lasted 10-15-ish years. Before that, there was "the industry with game rentals". Blockbuster was also absolutely eating up some sales.
But game rentals were often seen as a "try before you buy" case to many, as you may want to play a game more than 3-5 days. So maybe the answer is don't lease your game to Game Pass for a year at a time. Just offer it for a month or three. (Also make an easy way for the non-technical to export/import saves.) This also would let Microsoft make more deals for more games in their rotation. Seems like a shorter time helps everyone out.
Gamepass is going to continue betting worse until we end up with the mess that are streaming services right now.
I sincerely hope it fails.
Exactly. Right now developers get good deals when adding their games to game pass and the game pass is pretty cheap, but after game passes become "the thing" and developers have to be in a game pass, it will get worse for developers and consumers.
It has plateaued some time ago now. That's not failure, but it's not about to become Netflix either.
Microsoft is literally killing off game studios and dev jobs to fund AI. There’s absolutely no way that customers don’t get fucked when the end goal of game pass is met. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Plus, since SKG is a trending topic, you think they’ll think twice about killing games exclusively under GP or just dropping them? You’re not even paying for the games, just access. I got it a couple times when it was $1. After it went up I realised “oh cool so my entire library would be hostage for future price hikes”. Fuck that.
Game pass is awesome. Played a fuck ton of games at that price. Hope it stays forever, especially with that stacking model lol.
I love renting games. Worked for me at block buster 🤷♂️.
The premise itself is flawed, of course Gamepass impact sales, that’s the whole point. The question is does it negatively affect profit? Well for AAA games it might, for AA and indies it might affect positively and those make up the bulk of the gamepass library. Matter of fact there’s barely any AAA games released on GP that aren’t Microsoft’s own games.
AAA and AA haven't meant shit in this industry for a long long time. It's not even almost something I look for when looking for something new to play.
Oh that looks fun, but the budget just isn't high enough for me, next.
They need to bring back demos. It would help a ton if they did, but it seems so many companies and devs just completely skip the idea. I think some of it has to do with companies who kinda know their games aren't going to be worth a fuck so they want people to buy at full price, so they're not going to release a demo. Same with not releasing the game to reviewers early.
This is such a terrible take.
Of course AAA and AA mean something in the gaming industry! I'm hardly going to power my controller with a fucking 9V am I?
For a healthy mega publisher/platform with a lot of fingers in the pot? It will increase overall profits and, theoretically, those profits can be redistributed. This is effectively what EA did in the late 00s/early 10s where Madden and The Sims meant games like Mirror's Edge (or... The Sims) could be created.
The problem being that once a few of the tentpoles collapse? it ALL collapses
Also, this ignores the companies that aren't part of that megapublisher who now are fighting "just play Halo or Call of Duty, it is free with gamepass". At best it creates an environment where it doesn't really matter how well a game sells so long as you sold N licenses to Humble and MS and Sony and so forth. Which effectively incentivizes "streamer bait" games.
Also: We have seen exactly this play out in music and film/TV.
But Gamepass is not even close to being a tentpole. Halo and Call of Duty being in Gamepass has not limited the ability of games like BG3 being huge successes. If anything it frees up people to buy these type of games because their yearly COD is included in their monthly fee and now they can budget to buy other types of games.
Baldurs Gate 3? The game part of one of the bigger franchises in all of gaming (D&D) that is the sequel to one of the most celebrated franchises in all of gaming (Baldurs Gate) that had been in Early Access for years AND which was developed by one of the three best CRPG developers in all of gaming (Larian).
Well, you heard them: just make more Baldurs Gates!
Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all? Because that’s frankly hilarious. If anything like in music and movies (which is now also tv in a way), what’s more at risk are the big franchises. They’ve become unsustainable.
Gaming is going to look a lot more like the music industry looks now, with lots of indie companies doing great stuff and just a few huge artists making slop for the masses.
The "big franchises" that are how people find success in a gamepass world? Or do you still think that Dungeons and Dragons Presents Baldurs Gate 3 By Larian Studios is a tiny indie game?
Also: Maybe you should check out how the music industry is doing as countless artists talk about how hard it is to break out at all and one of the more popular bands on spotify (?) is literally AI slop?
Also
Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all?
Tell me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs without telling me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs.
If you want to discuss this? Either be open to learning or educate yourself ahead of time. But if you are just going to insist on vibes and how everything is going to just work out? You are wasting everyone's time.
If you go back 20, 30 years ago you would never be able to make a living as a musician in an indie project. Nowadays you have an amazing and frankly mind blowing amount of very talented artists making wonderful and unique music that also affords them a living. I love music man, so I know that it’s never been a better time to be a fan of music especially if you like stuff that breaks boundaries. There is more difficulty becoming huge, but again that’s how it works now. huge artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé etc are basically a dying breed. The AI slop thing is more about chillhop artists etc having difficulty because their music is not differentiated in any way and the people who listen to it are not actually looking at who the artists is 99% of the time. Artists will have to adapt and make music that is more unique now instead of hoping that they get on the queue of people who are not paying attention to what they are listening to.
The layoffs are proof of what I’m saying. Huge studios with thousands of employees are no longer sustainable, therefore they need to shed weight. The era of AAA 500million+ budget video games is coming to a close. More studios will close, more people will lose their jobs. From there a lot of smaller companies will spring up and that will be the gaming environment for the next 10 years or so.
I’ve been gaming all my life, I turned 30 recently. And I think the last 5 years have been some of the best the industry has ever had, and it was all thanks to the indie scene and the AA scene. There has never been more variety at this level of quality ever before, that’s for sure. The only thing that may come close was the 90s when you basically had a similar scene to what we have now.
All of this to say that from the perspective of the consumer, gaming/music/movies and tv are fantastic right now. But it’s become much more atomized, you have lots of niche shows, music acts and videogames as opposed to what we had before were there were a lot of larger properties but they all were a little dumbed down because they had to appeal to a large demographic within its niche.
The people who most praise Gamepass are indie developers. All the time. The ones that complain the most are the AAA studio employees for a reason, it threatens their entire model.
Does it suck for the developers, yes, I feel for them. But this is the market shifting to reflect consumer behavior and preference.
Edit: Btw it really shows you haven’t even looked at gamepass, because it hardly has any AAA games that are not MS properties. And the ones it’s has are quite old. So it’s not how people find success in Gamepass, at all.
It stopped being just $1 and instantly became the worst thing ever. /s
Is it as bad as the time Netflix killed the movie industry?
The movie industry is plenty capable of killing itself.
I'm not very inclined to take at face value what a studio founder has to say about a service that might make them less money, and might save their customers money.
Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.
Yeah but on the other hand the dumping business model where you sell stuff below cost to kill competition has been a staple of Silicon Valley.
Amd I'd rather the studio earn more money than the publisher in any case.
Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.
Except for the hilarious number of studios owned by Microsoft. One would hope Microsoft takes the effect of Game Pass into account when they're reviewing sales figures and shutting down studios. One would hope...
I like how this prophecy was foretold a clean 1 week after this shit really went downhill. Who could've thunk Microsoft would be a shitty money grubbing whore?