The massive growth of Game Pass is bringing some surprises to developers

The Game Pass was very big last month, but even from that perspective, the past two weeks have been huge. The Microsoft and Xbox subscription service is continuing the Katamari-like journey through the gaming industry, collecting titles at a rate that is really starting to catch up with the legendary “Netflix of Game”, a buzzword that has been circulating for at at least a decade, but that you don’t hear so much now that, well, you might actually be here.

It’s been simmering for a while, but recently it’s been moving fast. First came Bethesda’s downfall: after Microsoft finalized its acquisition of Zenimax Media, the service won 20 massive games at once, from retro jewelry like The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind to current box office hits like Doom Eternal and critical darlings like Dishonored 2 and Fanged. Then the announcement that the next looter Outriders would be released on the Game Pass on the first day, followed by an announcement of some of the most loved games, such as Undertale, Octopath Traveler and Nier Automata, all surprises in their own right. Finally, for good measure, we have the long awaited version of EA Play for PC. In the short term, it is clear that this thing is not getting smaller.

The value of the Game Pass to the consumer is quite simple: don’t pay a lot of money, win a ton of games. For those in the industry, things are a little more complicated: subscription services on this scale are still relatively new in the gaming world, but other sectors provide us with some scenarios of how things can get worse. The TV and film world seems to be moving fast to complete the domain of subscriptions, and while there are many more high-budget documentaries for TV and True Crime coming out, cinemas are a little less happy with the way it is all going. . In the music world, subscriptions are widely considered catastrophic: you will have a hard time finding a musician who talks about Spotify in more ironic terms. A viral tweet from E3 2019 summarizes some of the cautions around the whole idea succinctly:

Almost four years after the start of the Game Pass experiment, however, things are already changing differently than what happened with other industries. I spoke with British developer Codemasters, who makes the DiRT series of racing games and has been involved with Game Pass since day 1, before its recent acquisition by EA. For Vice President of Publishing Jonathan Bunney, it has not yet been a radical change in the industry: like so many disruptive developments in the past, it is just another facet of a constantly growing space, bringing new things to the table without supplanting the old ones. He sees it as an addictive experience, “one of the many tools in the modern game editor’s arsenal,” as he puts it.

“We see this as a way of extending the life of our games and bringing in players who would not necessarily buy the game. speaking as a consumer. I find myself discovering games I’ve never heard of, or games I’ve heard of, but I’m just not prepared to spend $ 60. ”

Bunney says the Game Pass has been a good way to find new fans and grow games in the U.S. market, where the Xbox is strongest, and believes that, in general, it has helped sales to players through the Game Pass.

For Microsoft’s Sarah Bond, one of the main differentiators between the Game Pass and the subscription services that have come to dominate the video and music industries is that it remains linked to the Xbox Live retail store and, therefore, the relationship between playing subscription and purchasing games is fluid in a way that is not replicated for these other services.

“When you subscribe to a channel that lets you watch a video, like Netflix,” she says, “this is kind of the end of the monetization cycle that you have with that piece of content. In games, it’s the opposite: there are items you can buy in the game, there are extensions you can buy, there is an upcoming franchise you can buy, there are other genres you can jump into. “

On average, according to Bond, Game Pass subscribers spend 20% more time playing, playing 30% more games, playing 40% more genres and, crucially, spend about 20% more on games in general. That can always change if the Game Pass and other subscriptions become a bigger part of the industry in general, but Bond emphasizes that there is still a lot of room for overall growth, especially since the Xbox is linking its streaming services to the Game Pass.

“There are 200 million people who buy a console and 3 billion people who play games,” she says. “Today, many of these people do not have the option to play many of the incredible experiences and iconic games that you see. When you really look at what we’re doing with the Game Pass, we’re making it possible by linking it to the subscription and putting our streaming in the subscription. We are able to make the economy of it all work ”.

Mike Rose, founder of No More Robots, was cautious when the signature train started to run. The company publishes some strange and esoteric titles, the kind that many initially concerned could have gotten due to the continued growth of services like the Game Pass. Narrative-based game developers, in particular, were concerned that a metrics-based approach to titles in subscription services might start to favor addictive multiplayer titles rather than single-player titles. With four games in the service, however, he is pleasantly surprised at support for a wide range of titles.

“It was a concern for me a few years ago, it is less of a concern for me now,” he says. “With them signing Hypnospace Outlaw and Nowhere Prophet, games that probably don’t fit the game pass model very well and are kind of niches and strangers. This calms my concerns down a little bit because it looks like they want the spread of games. “

All No More Robots games had a different experience when they reached the Game Pass. Online multiplayer game Descendants, he says, was perfectly tuned for the service and exploded as it fell in terms of overall performance and traditional sales, which he says quadruples.

“The effect we see is that people are playing on the Game Pass, saying to their friends, ‘Hey, come play with me’, they don’t want another subscription, so they are going to buy the game. We ended up getting a ton of players on the Game Pass and selling a ton too. ”

We saw the same effect in Sony’s PlayStation Plus service titles, which is not as expansive as the Game Pass, but still offers games for free. Rocket League is the key story there, where a massive infusion of free players at launch has led to a long and successful launch as a debut multiplayer title, but recently we’ve seen similar stories with titles like Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout or Bugsnax, both released for free on PlayStation Plus.

Other No More Robots titles, such as the police simulator of the dream landscape and the Internet ode of the late 90s Hypnospace Outlaw or card fighter Nowhere Prophet were not as well oriented as Descendants, but they still saw smaller sales jumps. Kingdom management RPG Yes your grace hit service around the launch of the Xbox Series X and saw a bigger increase as a result.

“The main thing for us is that sales have not decreased,” says Rose. “You worry about doing the thing for free and nobody is going to buy more: it didn’t happen.”

The Game Pass is firmly in its growth stage, when it has a strong incentive to be generous to both players and developers, and while players are still adapting to the idea. When asked if he cares if this dynamic will change in the future, Rose adapts a very typical posture of the indies in any creative space: “I care about everything”, he says.

While the past few years seem to have largely allayed some of the industry’s broader concerns about these services, developers remain agile, responding to an industry that tends to experience several seismic shifts in a decade. For Rose, he notes that players simply approach their purchasing decisions in a different way than in other sectors, which for whatever reason – the high level of commitment that people can bring to individual titles being the likely culprit – only because something is free does not mean that players will not pay for it.

“Many people tell us that they bought their games and also played them on the Game Pass. Other people saying they feel they don’t own it just on the Game Pass. So, they buy! This, to me, seems crazy! “