There was a time not too long ago when Game Pass was seen as the future of Microsoft's gaming brand, if not the industry as a whole, but as we wait for the rebranded Xbox to emerge from its devastating reset, it's an open question whether subscription services for games are really a sustainable business model.
IGN recently published a comprehensive writeup of the conception, boom, and recent downswings of Xbox Game Pass, and the site, one point, argued in favor of Xbox embracing smaller, more easily digested indie games instead of behemoth AAA releases. The logic is that subscribers could feel like they're getting their money's worth if they're playing more than a couple of games per year, which is a lot easier to achieve when the games available to them don't all take dozens of hours to beat.
However, according to industry analyst and Circana senior director Mat Piscatella, going indie isn't the answer to Xbox's Game Pass woes – in fact, it could just make things even worse.
"IMO the primary reason Game Pass failed to hit its subscriber targets is because the mass market simply does not care to play lots of games," Piscatella says on Bluesky in response to IGN's story. "The average player only buys 1 or 2 games a year, spends heaps of time in their favorite forever games, and that's it.
"Game Pass primarily attracted the most invested and enthusiast parts of the audience... but that's not who needs to be captured when you want tens to hundreds of millions in subs," says Piscatella.
With that in mind, you can see how IGN's argument that having more bite-sized games on the platform, of which "you could play two or three in a month," makes sense. But in Piscatella's view, focusing on indie games would only lessen Game Pass's mainstream reach. This approach "would appeal to an even smaller portion of the player base than exists now, accelerating the death spiral," he says.
Microsoft has yet to unveil its plans for the future of Game Pass, although we did see a significant price drop in the immediate aftermath of Asha Sharma's appointment as Xbox CEO. The previous 50% increase resulted in the loss of millions of subscribers over the course of just a few months, so it feels like Xbox will need an aggressive plan to win back paying customers. However, Piscatella strikes a fatalistic tone, pointing to "the crushing and devastating impact of the black hole behemoths sucking all the time and money from the rest of the market.
"It's not that [focusing on indie games] is a bad solution, it's just that for this particular challenge I don't see a solution," he says. "The team was told to turn the games business into a sub model, like everything else Microsoft was doing at the time. If anything was going to work, it would have been what they tried."
