Xbox Game Pass has made AAA and viral games a lot more accessible and cheaper for a lot of people around the world. In my country, it costs less than $15 a month and gives you hundreds of games to play, totaling probably thousands of dollars combined.
But that’s also a big problem, especially for games that are supposed to cost $50, $60, or more, since it significantly drives down revenue and obfuscates any given title’s “success.” Take The Outer Worlds 2, for example. A good game, but it had very few people engaging with it on Steam, with most preferring not to dish out $70 and play it through Game Pass instead since, as you know, it was available there on day one.
And Xbox’s studio executives seem to be well aware of this and, apparently, hate Game Pass with a passion. That is according to Jason Shreier (via wccftech), who says that Xbox will likely never kill Game Pass but will probably start mass-removing day-one titles from the service because “that makes no sense anymore.”
“You take a game like South of Midnight, that’s a game that was not exactly critically acclaimed or anything, but the people who really loved it, really loved it, really spoke to them,” Shreier said. “And that’s a game that costs $40 to buy, but on Game Pass, you can get it for, what was it, $15 a month, $20 a month, whatever it was at the point that that game was released.”
This creates an environment where people actively do not want to engage with a game by purchasing it in full but would rather take the Game Pass shortcut and save a whole lot of money. Due to this, Shreier explains, “There are a lot of people out there in studio leadership within Xbox who absolutely detest Game Pass and think it has destroyed the value of their games.”
“[They] think it has taken away from the value of all games in general just as a service,” he said, “[and that] it’s been a detriment to the games industry and those people’s views because of how it devalues games.”
We previously wrote that Game Pass really takes a major toll on games’ releases on other platforms, with many day-one titles suffering tremendously and failing to compete with themselves basically.
However, one could argue that players do not perceive Xbox’s first-party games as valuable enough to spend some extra cash, as we saw other day-one games do exceptionally well outside of Game Pass when fans genuinely believed they were worth it.
