He actually says a lot more about game pass. Rough transcript follows. I thought it was telling that his first response was that you can see they are still releasing content for the game. I only had time to listen to this section, but from the chapters on youtube looks like there is probably a lot of interesting info in this interview (there are a few more sections on game pass too). Could barely understand a word from the interviewers, sorry
What's the impact been for Dirt 5 and Gamepass?
It's been absolutely fantastic. Just fantastic.
Yeah?
Yeah, so, you might have noticed we've been giving regular content drops for Dirt 5. Just making sure we add new campaigns and cars and playground objects, features. And we've taken on player feedback and trying to address the different things that people might want changed or added. But in terms of player counts, I'm not going to give a number because I'm sure I'll get it wrong but it was shockingly huge. So, previously we were looking at, you know, player graphs, you know the daily, and were like okay cool this is going really well and then suddenly game pass (gestures up) and it was crazy. So we were really pleased to see that level of engagement. It was really great to see how that had such a positive effect on the game and the way it's talked about. That continues, as well. In that, Game Pass had obviously an initial massive push but it's sustained. I expect it to... obviously it's not the same on the second week, but it's still going and obviously we are still seeing really great numbers so we are really pleased with game pass. It's just a brilliant thing for the game
Is it a big deal for a developer to get a game on game pass? Is there some level of prestige with that?
I think that's a great question. So, uh, is there a prestige to it? Yeah, I think so in that it's nice to be able to talk about it with your friends and your friends can all just go pick it up if they're game pass subscribers and that sort of stuff.
working on a title like that (???) of course, we're human beings, we want our friends to notice it and check it out, so... But there is a level of fear as a technical director, because let's say, I'll pick a random number, in fact I'll pick a small number. Let's say you have 5000 players because you got on game pass. It was much more than that, but let's say that you add 5000 players and for you that's a big deal because servers are really flakey, so you bring the game out on game pass and now the whole thing falls over because suddenly now you have a huge influx, for you, of players and that's a scary thing. So going on to game pass, firstly, the teams at Microsoft were super helpful at just helping us out with what we should expect, what kind of things we should anticipate, how we communicate that across our teams, who to reach out to if there is a problem. We actually did have a problem, and it wasn't anything to do with any of the server tech or anything like that. Just an optimization issue on one of the servers and so we had to take 2 hours of downtime. I was very pleased with this, this was (???) for me. So I was talking to one of our server engineers and he was very unhappy that we had downtime -- I said we had 2 hours of downtime in the life of the product so far! I'm super super happy with it. But yeah, Game Pass isn't a thing you can just lob your title into and just say okay sure it'll be fine. You do have to think about it and plan. Make sure that the content is going to be available. If you've got new content drop coming, you want to have that to come around the same time so that players can see that and add to all the buzz. So yeah, it's definitely an interesting proposition to think about what's the impact to your title. It might be a good time to publish some of that, to kind of publicize the more social elements of your title when you've got more players coming in at that point. It's the kind of thing you think about for, I don't know...
For the length of the time (???)
Oh, I mean a year in advance. Like, I've seen some people say so you just signed a deal with Microsoft and put it on. Well, no, that's not how these things work. You don't sign a deal and get it on game pass a week later or something. These things take time, they're planned, they're coordinated. So you think about how that fits into your service of the game going forward. Are you at a good point in the service to introduce that many players? It's carefully planned.
(???) Is this uncharted territory. Is this breaking new ground? (???) these subscription services are a bit, are they going to eat into our... or was this a no-brainer to you?
Well, for me, the finances of it just have nothing to do with it which is great. You know, I get asked to be involved in those kind of deals just to validate from a technical perspective but in terms of does it make financial sense or what was the deal? all that kind of stuff -- I have no information on, sorry
As individual developers does being on game pass have a material difference on your bonus scheme or anything like that?
At Codemasters it doesn't work that way, no. I'm very happy with how it panned out
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