Indeed. I believe this will eventually happen in the long run. Long term we will see these effects. And it won't be pretty.
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Game Pass users are playing 40% more games - including titles outside of the program
- Thread starter xeroyear
- Start date
GamePass has been a godsend for me. Since I subscribed (3 years for $1 gang), I haven't bought several games that I was planning to buy due to their inclusion in the service. Hell, since I subbed I have bought 2 games: Borderlands 3 and Control. Everything else is in "wait until it's on GamePass" mode. I'm waiting on basically any indie title because odds are that the best ones end up on GP at some point.
Are the majority of devs big and small willing to speak about Game Pass, talking positively or negatively? Genuine question. Your argument seems to make it sound like a lot of devs are worried. Just curious.
1. you as a dev have to be picked and agree to the amount of money they pay you. A win for the dev.
2. It isn't F2P, they are getting paid to have their game on the service. It's not F2P where all the income only comes from microtransactions.
3. I'm not a idiot or dick.
Without knowing exactly how they calculated this percentage, it doesn't mean much.
A subscriber to Game Pass that didn't own an Xbox prior, and bought zero games prior, but who buys a game afterwards will skew the statistics. If they buy one title after, then yes, they bought more titles than they did before joining, because they're new to the ecosystem.
A subscriber to Game Pass that didn't own an Xbox prior, and bought zero games prior, but who buys a game afterwards will skew the statistics. If they buy one title after, then yes, they bought more titles than they did before joining, because they're new to the ecosystem.
I can't speak to the majority as I don't have any stats on that I'm sure opinion among devs can be varied as the type of game you're interested in making could very well be extremely suited to a subscription heavy future. But certainly the worries exists and I think the reasons put forth are somewhat understandable.
And that doesn't mean at large devs won't adapt like how people or even larger companies like Nintendo adapted to what the mobile market asks. But the worries put forth relate to not liking those potential trends.
1. I dunno what this argument even is. The concerns have nothing to do with how things are now but with how things could turn out to be and if you think that negotiation conditions especially for smaller developers will be forever favorable as the service continues to grow, well maybe learn a bit more about capitalism. Because what incredible naivety.
2. Why are you making an argument that has 0 to do with anything I said....
3. If you dismiss the concerns from developers as the people did that I called out you absolutely are both. And clearly the motivation is purely self interest "I save money shut up" and a total disinterest in actually understanding why developers worry.
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This is kind of like "VR is the future of gaming!". Maybe, but a distant future, not the near. Streaming being the default way to play games at home at least won't be a thing for at least another decade, if even then. There's still that pesky thing called a data cap as well as sketchy service in general to iron out first.
It won't change my buying habits in the slightest. Instead of paying full price for The Outer Worlds (a game that I theoretically will love mind you), I will be able to rent it for an entire month for only $5.00. I did the same thing with Anthem too, but that game wasn't worthy of $60, let alone $30 at launch anyway. If TOW is really good, and they release DLC that is also pretty good, I can just buy it later on down the line for half the price ayway. There used to be a time where I wouldn't hesitate buying games on day one, even if I could rent them instead, but not so much anymore.
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That implies that XBox software sales are up YOY then? Anyone have any actual data regarding that?
The very first comment of this IGN piece says it all :
That's what GP is : it's just grabbing consumers from everywhere, keep them in the xbox ecosystem and just let them spend their money as they used to. MS knows that consumer spendings on gaming are rising, they are positionning themselves for the future, they just need people to be addicted to GP with a constant flow of games added and well curated. Then consumers will do as they always used : spend money to buy more game. It's not a 0 sum game. It might not be winning money now, but I'm sure they have all the data needed to forecast the breakeven point where there will be enough GP suscribers to start to have more profit than simply selling full priced games.
Just imagine this : you take GP just for gears 5 for 1 or 2$, discover MK10 that you never thought buying because that's not your kind of game, like it and buy some DLC, or like it enough then buy MK11 outside of GP or MK 12 when it will launch. Is that an uncommon situation ? multiply this by the endless combinations of games, genres, DLC, games leaving the service that people will buy to keep,... and you can see that there are many possibilities for MS to recoup the loss of a full priced Gears 5. Then it's a netflix situation : the more subscribers => the more revenue => the more content => the more subscribers=>... They just need to start the engine and that's why they almost give it to everyone for 1$ (and once sucessful will do like netflix and increase the price, people will cry about it but that's too late and competition is already too late)
The discourse about Game Pass is a great litmus test to see who understands where gaming is going and who is still mired in the past, stuck on arguing about unit sales and NPD numbers.
What actually are the real arguments against a sub model? People are saying this paints a bleak future of the games industry that forces some kind of 'pay-per-attention-span' or 'pay-per-time-played' model on a product going to market. Isn't there an argument that XGP would fail if it didn't have a diverse line-up and mix of MP and SP titles that actually could attract, and compete for a wide range of people's attention? Surely the games come first, and if they are a good fit (whatever that means), they get paid up front for an appearance fee. If you don't produce a game that 'fits', then what - is the argument that traditional online stores won't exist outside of these subs to sell these games, and that game design will be skewed towards games that grab and hold onto your attention?
Exactly. I bought Gears 4 day one and largely regretted it as I enjoued the campaign, but didn't like any of the other modes so I barely played it. Playing through Gears 5 on a $1 month of Gamepass Ultimate was a no brainer, and I'll just pay the $10-15 for a month of Gamepass for any future Xbox xclusives I want to play and probably some third party stuff I'd rather not buy too.
Time will tell if they make more of other types of gamers than they lose from people like me who'll no longer buy exclusives we would have bought before Gamepass.
Yeah, I was thinking the same about this stat. At first it sounds like people with game pass increased their expendure on games, but it's actually comparing 2 different groups of people, which could have completely different interest on buying games in the first place, so it's not possible to draw a causality relation between gamepass and buying more games.
And you are assuming that out of the tens of thousands of games that are released and the thousand of games that are going to be released every year, that people stay subscribed after they have played the cool looking games on Gamepass after a month or two. Can Gamepass compete with the wide arrangement of different genres and audience preferences?
The people who just want to play whatever is on the service and have no preferences are the minority here and not the players who only subscribe to get a AAA release for cheap.
Why would you expect a Game Pass user, someone who is consuming digital content, to go purchase Gears physically? Better yet, they said it increases purchasing of games OUTSIDE the program...Gears is inside.
How long is this model sustainable for Microsoft? They are currently doing it because they need games on the platform. But what about the future?
Either they have to heavily decrease the amount paid up front or they have to pay out devs with the playtime model.
Unlike VR, though, where the capital cost of hardware is always going to be a factor (whether you pay for it upfront, or it's amortised over a subscription period the way smartphones are,) these barriers are surmountable. In fact they've already been overcome in many places; most of Europe has access to reasonable, uncapped internet, with 50% of the UK being able to access fibre-to-the-cabinet or fully fibre optic speeds of 50mb/s and up. I personally have a 70mb/s connection, with no data cap, and it costs about £30 per month.
People also throw around "decades" pretty liberally, without really considering how much can change in ten years. We've only had what you'd class as smartphones for 12 years, and Twitch (and the broader rise of streamers) has been a thing for only 8. Hell, Netflix only started the streaming portion of its business in 2010. In the year 2000, only 3% of Americans had broadband; and a decade later that figure was 66%. And, anecdotally, since 2009 I've seen a 10X or more increase in the speed and reliability of my home internet connection.
While I'll definitely admit that most countries should be investing more in their telecoms infrastructure, and America in particular has to find some way out of the quagmire that is its anti-consumer connectivity market, I don't think we should underestimate how much can change in the lifespan of a console generation.
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So have I, but it's irrelevant for two reasons. The first is that I am still paying a premium price for speeds that are well behind what many are getting for half the cost and secondly, I never actually had a data cap until two years ago. So hurray, my internet is "faster" but more restricted than ever.
The US is so far behind much of Europe and Asia regarding infrastructure that it will take us at least a decade to catch up to where they are now, and we will likely always be trying to catch up. If the US is supposed to account for even a fourth of the game streaming money, I would think most of the companies trying to go this route would base their plans around the weakest link. It's cool that some people have Google Fiber and only pay $90 a month. Good for them, but they are in the extreme minority.
for the people who say how is gamepass sustainable how are the developers being paid? are they being paid when redbox buys a boatload of games? and rents them out? are they seeing money from gamestop/bestbuy/walmart/ebay used sales? how about gamefly? no they are more than likely making more money in the long run with the subscription model along with cosmetics and other dlc and are making money off their backlog. the goal with the subscripions model is to make the the entry level cheap enough that monthly people will give you the 10-15 dollars instead of giving it to redbox,gamefly or gamestop eliminating those markets makes more money for the creators of the content and platform owners.
No need for hostility, I completely misread the OP, I apologize.
It's staggering how bad things are for you folks. Even your mobile data infrastructure is bad; I come to New York and Boston a few times a year for work, and it's just perplexing how slow your 4G networks are. I'm in centre of Manchester (the UK one, not NH) right now, and a mobile data speed test shows I'm getting 25mb/s down. I did the same test a few times in New York in September, and I was lucky to get more than 500kb/s. Boston wasn't much better.
We could be entering a strange scenario, where despite creating so much of the world's technology and technology-centric services in-country, US companies are going to be forced to start prioritising European and Asian markets.
Since when is asking a question considered hostility?
Excuse my hostility once again...
I don't think any metrics have been provided for how payment works for developers, but Giant Bomb mentioned they heard Game Pass has been very kind to them. The developers behind Human Fall Flat seem to be doing well because they keep updating the game and advertising the update. They must see a lot of people jump back in with each update (good game too, I recommend playing it).
Yes
Yes
The last data we have said otherwise, they justified that it was because of gamepass and it make sense.
At the start, you entice your customers to the model until they grow used of paying less for a lot of games
To do this, they need to pay devs up front for now, so devs are on board with the program.
At certain point in time customers:
a) Will perceive a lot less value in games per se and perceive a lot of value in the subscription (pay less for more)
b) Will be willingly trapped in the ecosystem (Because for the end user, it's really great value)
If dev payment changes at this point in time to a model that's not as good as getting paid reasonably up front, devs will have to:
a) Bite the bullet, as the majority of customers are now trapped in that business model
b)Develop games that will maximize their revenue (and that mostly of the time is not good for the players: bloating, mtx, prioritizing game types that you can monetize easily)
c) Try their hand on the traditional online stores, while dealing with the "New Customer", that I described above.
So as some people said multiple times, right now things are great for everyone.
However, It does not guarantee that the model will not change for devs in the future.
Changes in Dev payment will always be transparent to end user, and changes mostly likely will come when the model has consolidated.
With ballooning game dev costs, this could be very problematic, even more so to small devs.
It's like investments: Past performance is not guarantee of future results.
Then none of these makes sense. If softwares sales are down YOY, then people are not buying more games, period.
Why these passive aggressive posts are still tolerated is beyond my understanding. The jury is still out on whether GP is ultimately sustainable (especially for the larger industry to adopt a model like this) this data does nothing to prove or disprove its profit margin, growth, or sustainability.
Who are you even mocking here? Neither side know jack shit at this point. These types of post really make me feel there's an us vs. them just because I happen to prefer a certain box. Y'all need to stop.
I don't know, perhaps ask Phil Spencer himself ?
Phil Spencer: Putting AAA games in Game Pass leads to a significant increase in sales
I noticed this in the new interview. https://youtu.be/Z5y0OvZgcIs
www.resetera.com
Well, it's no secret that console wars here is like Cold War. Why is still allowed is something that I don't get.
Probably offset by how many people got GamePass and only or mostly played Gears 5, so most of the monthly fee goes to The Coalition.
Why would this data somehow refute those concerns from developers
Sorry, it did not sound like a normal question, but I am also under the weather. Before reading the OP anew, I was thinking that just because people are playing more genres on a subscription service (which can be head for 1 dollar a month) does not automatically lead to more purchases in said genres. I am also playing more genres now thanks to GP, but I don't go and buy more games in said genres.
Because we can look beyond the next year. Success for indie developers means nothing if those were just incentives to get games on the service. What happens when there are thousands of games on Gamepass, will Microsoft still pay those developers handsomely? How does Microsoft make money out of that?
For every person like you, there are likely dozens who do not. Services like Netflix and Gamepass make a killing from people who either sign up for a month and forget to unsubscribe or people who keep the subscription because these services are at a price point that is easy to forget. Heck, I originally signed up for Netflix for Stranger Things and three years later I still have the service despite only watching a handful of content, most of it Netflix Original content.
You're making assumptions. I'm not saying they're wrong, but it's helping some indie developers right now.
