Game pass is good for one month and playing like 3 single player games. But it’s really been the final nail, last gasp whatever you want to call it for XBOX. Its not sustainable, has stalled out and larger developers have had enough of getting f**** over.
Founder of Arkane Studios: "I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade"; impacts sales
Submitted 8 months ago by Pro@programming.dev to games@lemmy.world
https://i.imgur.com/qffgqpV.png
Comments
TwinTitans@lemmy.world 8 months ago
sommerset@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
What’s a gamepass?
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Instead of buying a license for a game for $70 you subscribe to a rental service that gives you access to 500 games for $10/month.
Or, instead of buying a $500 console or a $800 PC you just buy a $60 controller and you stream those games running on “the cloud” (=someone else’s console) for $15/month
Problem is that the service is provided by Microsoft at a loss and when they’ll get enough critical mass, they’ll enshittify it.
The economic proposition is good, but I think it’s just to teach gamers that “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”
13igTyme@lemmy.world 8 months ago
A pass for games.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 8 months ago
Sooo… Gamepass is one of the services that is driving up the price of the non-gamepass versions of those games, right? They’ve got to recoup costs somehow, and then the rest of the industry takes that as an opportunity to consider these inflated prices as the new baseline.
Tillman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
[deleted]Ledivin@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The market has also increased 1000-times over, while simultaneously removing physical barriers entirely. The development itself is more expensive, sure, but the potential gains have increased at a much quicker rate, especially for smaller games.
AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Isn’t this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.
AlexLost@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Of Microsoft? That’s like business 101 my dude, and mostly why business schools should be burned to the ground. The system we have stifles innovation and promotes greed. We fucked.
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It is classic tech company strategy.
We saw it with Amazon offering suspicious deals for years on name brand stuff to kill competitors. Uber offering subsidized rides to kill taxis. Google Photos offering unlimited free storage
If it seems too good to be true, check under your feet and see if there’s a rug there.
DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Except now it’s just spyware
burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world 8 months ago
is there anyone making any money from video games at this point?
rumba@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
- Publishers. They always get their buck.
Studios get gobbled up, mass layoff, explode and reform month by month.
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Game engines. Nobody is going to even try to reinvent that wheel. Unreal and Unity make a fuckton of cash whether a game does or not. Yeah I hear you, but but but they have income limits, studios release one good ish title, they’re expected to pay like it’ll always happen.
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Stores. At least until recently there was not even a slight challenge against the stores control. Now with Apple versus Epic, everybody’s dying to funnel people into their own payment system, But honestly, stores are still making all the money, there’s still the primary method of advertising that works and they still hold all the cards for making sure you show up in their “searches”.
If you manage to bottle lightning the studio makes a fuck ton of money, assuming you haven’t already sold your soul to venture capital. (Hint, If it’s more than two guys in a garage, they’ve already all sold their sole adventure capital)
ICastFist@programming.dev 8 months ago
Mobile gacha shit
Sidhean@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
ICastFist@programming.dev 8 months ago
“But if you offer all these old games to play, why would anyone bother buying the new stuff?” - some corpo director
Blackmist@feddit.uk 8 months ago
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn’t as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn’t killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the “wait for a sale” people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that’s a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
rumba@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
I thought that was during Covid.
I’m honestly surprised that movie theaters even exist still. Motion picture groups basically starve the theaters to the point where they can only survive off of concessions. The places are almost universally dirty and understaffed. Most of the mom and pop shops died off decades ago.
Tillman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And as an industry they return less than the sp500 so not only is movie viewing horrible, movie making is a terrible investment .
Blackmist@feddit.uk 8 months ago
According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.
Lots of others did it during covid though.
The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.
We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn’t all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5…
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Yet another example of:
C Suite / Upper Management doesn’t listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they’re being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
The goal is to lose money to capture the market and once it is done, to recoup their loss and bleed the market dry.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Yes, but if they can’t actually pull of the last part… uh… that doesn’t end well.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 8 months ago
Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.
How many times have we already seen this?
dickalan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I canceled it when I canceled every other subscription except real debrid
sheogorath@lemmy.world 8 months ago
One of the shit thing is that all the games that I’ve bought in the last 5 years all has come into game pass.
BilboBargains@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
Ledivin@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google.
lol, feel free to let me know when any actual consequences come from that
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
We haven’t seen antitrust with teeths for a while now.
Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple should have been broken up in a million little pieces a long time ago, but it won’t happen.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The only part of the gamepass that is monopolistic is the friends network it creates.
vala@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Honestly who cares. Stop buying AAA slop and support indies.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 8 months ago
Only open-sourced, homebrewed, and single-person is what we need!
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
10 people or less.
Captain of Industry is a gem with a 4 person team Risk of Rain was 2, expanded to 3
That’s still at a human scale.
Phegan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Game pass might be the best deal in gaming, but you are selling your soul to the devil for it. It will ultimately harm gaming, especially developers long term. We should reject game pass.
mrfriki@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This has been so obvious from the beginning, and now that it’s too late is when they starting to complain.
baatliwala@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Game pass is awesome. Played a fuck ton of games at that price. Hope it stays forever, especially with that stacking model lol.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Hey, uh, is Uber still cheaper than a taxi?
Oh, no, it isn’t, and taxis largely don’t exist anymore.
Roughly the same business model there.
You’re trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.
baatliwala@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You definitely have a point… if US was the only country in the world and Uber did not provide a much better service than our local taxis.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 8 months ago
Hope it stays forever
Oh boy, have I got some news for you
baatliwala@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I know, I know lmfao. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to leach the hell out of this until it goes away.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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 customer 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.
CatDogL0ver@lemmy.world 8 months ago
MS is making money from Gamepass
ano_ba_to@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Have they paid off the 70 billion? If they are making money, why are they firing people and cancelling projects?
_stranger_@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
We call it the Walmart model
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
ter_maxima@jlai.lu 8 months ago
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 yo 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.
ApatheticCactus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I worked at BlockBuster back when Netflix came out. It was legit a great contender, and an awesome service. BB had their own mail service, but it was just seen as a copycat. Also the franchise had a LOT of bad blood, and sometimes rightfully so. Depended on local management how much leeway you could have. The most lax stores that were lenient did the best.
The reason it worked was because physical media is protected by the first sale doctrine. So if you could buy a disc, it could be under one roof as rentable inventory.
Streaming and licenses is what fragmented everything and greed gave the appropriate incentive.
It also somewhat killed direct competition. When everything was physical on a shelf in front of you, all for the same price, you had direct comparison and competition. You could have any show or movie from any studio all side by side. That $2-5 could get you anything, across the board.
I saw this all coming from miles away. I don’t blame anyone, every step sounded like a great deal. I see a lot of the same things with Gamepass. It’s a great deal, and I don’t blame anyone for using it… But I don’t see it as being a long term net positive for the industry.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Netflix used to be too good to be true as well.
So was Moviepass, but while they were operating it was a great deal for the consumer. I wasn’t going to sit that out just because I could see that they were gonna run out of money eventually.
The proper consumer response to these types of models (get them hooked with a great value proposition and then try to squeeze them once they’re in) is just to leave when things get bad. Subscribing to Netflix in 2013 doesn’t mean that I had to keep subscribing through 2023. I could get the benefit of a 2014 subscription and reevaluate each year whether it was worth continuing.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 8 months ago
you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch
justwatch is pretty reliable and can save you tens of hours on your search apparently
zerofk@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Sadly justwatch doesn’t work for me because it thinks Belgium is only Wallonia.
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
So does sailing the high seas
buttnugget@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I love JustWatch. Gets you the exact info you’re looking for pronto.
Hoimo@ani.social 8 months ago
Justwatch reliably tells me “this isn’t available for streaming in your region”. Sonarr tells me it’s an AMZN Webrip and I can Just Watch™
AgentRocket@feddit.org 8 months ago
That may be true, but that wasn’t the point he tried to make. The problem is that netflix used to have everything at a good monthly price and once they dominated the market, enshittification and price hike started, plus all the other companies wanted in on the action, starting their own service.
Now MS is trying to do the same to the PC gaming market.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 8 months ago
May as well enjoy it while it lasts. Like Moviepass.
victorz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Can confirm, I never stopped pirating for 20+ years.
Jeffool@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
Blockbuster was just seen as a “try before you buy” case to many, as you want to okay a game more than 3-5 days. So maybe the answer is not lease your game to Game Pass for a year at a time. Just offer it for a month or three. This also would let Microsoft make more deals for more games in their rotation. Seems like a shorter time helps everyone out.
tobz619@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah, honestly, what was wrong with games releasing Demos?
I think a lot of games would do well if they also bundled limited demos of other games with them too like back in the old days.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Yeah, it used to be quite common for PC gaming magazines to include a demo disk, basically, here’s the game and the first level or two, often you could fit a couple game’s demo versions on one cd.
GamesPass could easily do something like uh… hey, this game here, you can play for 2 or 5 or 10 hours, and then if you want more, you can buy it with… I dunno, a 1/4 to 1/3 discount if you’re subbed to GamesPass, and you’ve got the playtime.
EarMaster@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Is it as bad as the time Netflix killed the movie industry?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The movie industry is plenty capable of killing itself.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 8 months ago
It stopped being just $1 and instantly became the worst thing ever. /s
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
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
Prox@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What’s “short” about the short-sightedness, though? I’ve been a Game Pass subscriber for something like 8 years and it’s still crushing it as far as services go - probably moreso now than any year prior.
Will it last / remain a good deal forever? Nope. But nothing does/is. Might as well enjoy the great variety of games I’d never purchase (like Blue Prince, Arcade Paradise, Shipbreaker, South of Midnight, Expedition 33, etc.) along with the convenience of access to games I totally would pay for (like THPS 1+2, Gears, Diablo, etc.). Plus the built-in rewards subsidize like 1/4 of the cost.
When (not “if”, when) they jack up the price to a point that’s not worth the games or I don’t have enough time to play to justify the spend, I’ll just cancel.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What’s “short” about the short-sightedness, though?
Gamepass attacks the developers, not the consumers.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 8 months ago
i get the feeling gamepass gives you access to the library of games that my library has. fantastic if your library doesn’t have video games or you have difficulty getting out of the house, but i love my local library
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
If you had been buying games you’d have a library 🤷
skisnow@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Absolutely. Every indicator available suggests Enshittification will hit the subscription models within the next few years.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I thought subscriptions were enshittification, you mean it gets even worse?
couldhavebeenyou@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Riding the subsidized waves until the point of enshittification and then dumping it faster than a hot turd is what makes the shareholder cry
IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I love renting games. Worked for me at block buster 🤷♂️.
whostosay@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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?
Renacles@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
Wawe@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
CTDummy@aussie.zone 8 months ago
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 not even paying for the game, 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.
Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
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 day one on GP that isn’t Microsoft’s own games.
AGD4@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
ter_maxima@jlai.lu 8 months ago
Maybe it says more about me than about game pass, but even at 5€ a month it would be significantly more money than I spend on games every year.
Not that I couldn’t afford it, but I mostly play games that are at least 5 to 10 years old, either on second-hand physical copies or heavily discounted sales/keyshops. The most recent game I’ve bought is Elden Ring, even then only recently because I found a cheap physical copy.