I'm more interested to hear what he'd say to those developers who are worried about how these models might impact their business. (And I think that's what 'gamers' who voice these concerns are worried about - not about Xbox's P+L).
I mean, I'm not necessarily one of those people - but it's a bit wrong to say those who have voiced concerns are simply worrying about Xbox's bottom line, and therefore shouldn't.
Agreed. This comes across as not arrogant, but sorta tone deaf. Of course consumers are going to worry about what affects them, but acting like your service isn't devaluating titles and affecting how devs and studios do business is a little disingenuous.
Sorry Phil, but it does matter to us because we fear subscription services dramatically affecting development cost and development as we know it and having an impact on how creators make money like with music, film, TV the past 10 years
Really don't think that's the question being asked...people are wondering what it means for developers on game pass and the cause and effect of Xbox heavily pushing a subscription service and what that means for the value of games and digital and physical game sales.
I'm thinking of e.g. devolver's comments here - I don't think it's that they feel forced to put games on gamepass, but feel it might become unavoidable, or might disrupt the economics of development in a way that nobody can ignore, even those who don't partake or don't want to partake in sub services. I mean the worry expressed in that dev's comments related to things that could affect any dev if a lot of gamers start relying on sub services for the majority of their gaming, not just those who are or aren't on the services.
But I mean, those devs can speak for themselves. I think that conversation is the more interesting one, not 'oh how will MS make money'. I mean, you're right, in that nobody should care about Microsoft's bottom line in this.
What "matters" to me are big budget single-player games. If they will still be viable we will only know in a few years.
We are concerned about the devs, not one of the richest mega corporations in the world....
It a nice way to tell the corporate ball lickers to settle down, but it doesn't address the fears of many of the others. They convinced themselves that subs are a potential threat to the games they liked and must be fought. Granted Phil could shout from the rooftops that AAA single-player games not loaded with microtransactions are the future and people would still doubt him. Until we get a body of evidence showing one way or the other I fully expect the conversation about how subs might be bad for devs to be the new "used games are bad for devs" or "rentals are bad for devs" of yesteryear.
Personally, I don't give two shits about Microsoft's or developers' bottom lines. I will try and get the best value I can and they will either adjust to the changing market or someone else will take their place. I mean don't get me wrong there are plenty of developers I don't want to see go under, but I am not going to start paying outrageous sums to keep them afloat.
Where is any evidence or real line of thinking for any of this??? When has anything like this ever happened in history? There is none...it's just all conjecture based around people who want to say something negative about what a big publisher is doing. There has been zero evidence of a business model in entertainment changing it for the worst. GamePass enables Microsoft to take more risks on games, not less! I don't understand how someone being able to play tons of games for $5-$10 per month is bad, but that same person only have access to one game for $60, for six months, is better? There are things like engagement, word-of-mouth and active users that are talked about all the time that people that create these posts continue to ignore.
There is NO business logic or commentary from devs or anyone even remotely asscociated with any business of any kind to support these dramatic conclusions. So GamePass is going to bring about an end of single player games??????????
Let's be clear...there has been ONE question from one publisher (Devolver Digital) about the service...and they didn't have any of the numbers from Microsoft, so really they weren't any more educated that you, and they didn't say it was the end of single player gaming, or that it will lead to more MTX...none of the ridiculous extremes being hinted at here. And then...they went and put one of their games on the service! How much you want to bet that Microsoft showed them some receipts and they changed their tune!
Also...a little game called The Outer Worlds managed to be the 4th best selling Xbox game on the NPD charts despite being a major reason people signed up for GamePass. Hyper-paranoia based negativity can't explain that away.
imagine this scenario
you have 100 million subscribers
that's $1 billion a month for 12 months... so imagine about $100 million is for costs in running the service (unsure of what actual cost would be considering it's leveraging existing infrastructure they own)
if they had 5 games a month for a rough turnover of 33% of the library in a year then theoretically every game would be bought for about $180 million on average which is AAA money... apply a ratio for differing development costs and oh boy would the dynamics of the industry get real interesting then. MS would basically be paying big money to studios to make games and THEN they are able to sell on other platforms to get ROI.
there's so many creative things they can do with the service when it gets enough subscribers.
Sure, but can you provide examples as to why this is will be bad for devs without making assumptions?
People have brought up these points. They don't care. This is about hyper-paranoia that big publishers are only capable of doing things bad to ruin gaming. We really had someone on the previous page say that from a business standpoint, Microsoft has made "mistake after mistake"...LOL...like LITERALLY making stuff up with no logic or business sense on any level. Subscriptions services have universally been widely successful at creating more avenues for content producers of all types to get more attention and money that was ever offered before in traditional "buy at once" media. This is like the people that complained about having to pay over $100 for 150 channels of cable with commercials, then concern troll with "BUT NOW THAT I HAVE ACCESS TO JUST THE CONTENT I WANT WHY DO I HAVE TO BUY ALL THESE SERVICES IT'S JUST LIKE CABLE!"
Or the other thread on the EtcetEra complaining about pop music...on the radio...LOL music is great now because so many smaller and unique artists are getting 1,000x the money and shine that they would have gotten before Spotify came along.
