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Recently, Pete Hines, a former Bethesda executive, said Xbox Game Pass wouldn't be what it is today without the developers who make games for it. He stressed the need to support them, and now, former Xbox Game Studios vice president Shannon Loftis has added her thoughts on the business model.
"When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don't figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content – without which your subscription is worth jack shit – then you have a real problem," Hines said in an interview with DBLTAP.
"As a longtime first party Xbox developer, I can attest that Pete [Hines] is correct," Loftis writes on LinkedIn (spotted by Tweak Town). "While [Game Pass] 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 [Game Pass] 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."
When you consider a game like Hi-Fi Rush, which was a critical success but still saw its studio closed by Microsoft (before being revived by Krafton), it's easy to see how tensions could arise.
Is a Game Pass game successful if a lot of people play it, and will that be enough for Microsoft to consider one of its studios valuable enough to keep open? Or do sales still matter more than anything, in which case Game Pass inclusion might actually hurt studios?
I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.
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