If you listen to anyone on the Xbox team, they’ll tell you that Xbox Game Pass is the greatest thing around and that it’s been doing great on all the platforms it’s on. To be fair, for gamers, it’s a great value. You get access to a large library of titles for a low-ish monthly rate, and you can even get “Day One” access to key AAA titles from both 1st and 3rd party developers. However, when you ask the actual developers about this service, including those who used to work for Xbox, the reaction to the service becomes a lot more mixed.
To be blunt, numerous people across the industry have blasted the Xbox Game Pass as actually hurting certain developers and even accused Microsoft and Xbox of inflating the “value” of such a service. A new voice to that party is former Xbox Game Studios VP Shannon Loftis. On LinkedIn, she commented on a post by former Bethesda exec Pete Hines, who blasted Game Pass for not truly being “supportive” of developers. Loftis added onto that with:
“As a longtime first party Xbox developer, I can attest that Pete is correct. While GP can claim a few victories with games that otherwise would have sunk beneath the waves (human fall flat, e.g.), the majority of game adoption on Gap comes at the expense of retail revenue, unless the game is engineered from the ground up for post-release monetization. I could (and may someday) write pages on the weird inner tensions this creates.”
Others chimed in on the comment thread to add their own thoughts to the mix, but no matter what, this highlights from those truly in the know that the Game Pass service is hardly flawless, and might be hurting developers.
Source: LinkedIn
