Xbox Game Pass is always a hot topic. Is it the best deal in gaming or is it a threat to how people have played games for generations? Is it good for devs or not? PlayStation's ex-boss Shawn Layden has once again chimed into the debate and he's once again not a big fan of the subscription service, to put it mildly.
Xbox's subscription is by no means the only monthly pay-as-you-go service around. PlayStation and EA have their own versions too, but Microsoft differentiates Game Pass by dropping every single one of its own first-party releases – from Grounded 2 to every Call of Duty – on to the service on launch day, along with other day-one third-party games, such as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and (maybe one day) Hollow Knight: Silksong.
"There's a lot of debates going on. Is Game Pass profitable? Is Game Pass not profitable? What does that mean? That's really not the right question to ask anyway," Layden, who led most of the PS4 generation and served as the president of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, tells Gamesindustry.biz. "You can do all kinds of financial jiggery-pokery for any sort of corporate service to make it look profitable if you wanted to."
Layden's issue comes from how Game Pass and similar subscription models potentially devalue the people making games for the service. "I don't think it's really inspiring for game developers," he said. "They're not creating value, putting it in the marketplace, hoping it explodes, and profit sharing, and overages, and all that nice stuff. It's just, 'You pay me X dollars an hour, I built you a game, here, go put it on your servers.'"
"I'm not a big supporter of the 'Netflix of gaming' idea," he adds. "I think it is a danger." He even went one step further and argued that a developer under Game Pass essentially becomes a "wage slave."
Not every developer sees Game Pass in the same light, though, since not every Game Pass deal is built the same. Citizen Sleeper designer Gareth Damian Martin previously said they wouldn't have had the opportunity to make a sequel without the service: "I know many indies whose projects have massively benefited."
The Falconeer's Tomas Sala also came to the service's defence last year, arguing that it's "generally a positive thing" for indies because Microsoft is "more than fair in compensation and you get a huge audience." Games industry analyst Mat Piscatella also argued that the industry's biggest live service games – your Fortnites and CoDs - are a "far bigger threat" to new games.
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