This year has marked Xbox’s “largest investment in Game Pass to date”, according to ID@Xbox boss Chris Charla.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Charla discussed the current state of the subscription service in the face of recent criticism, noting positive sentiment from developers and a desire to return for future projects.
“The majority of partners who’ve had a game in Game Pass want to bring their future titles to the service,” said Charla. “As a result, we’ve signed deals with more than 150 partners to expand the catalogue. We continue to engage with hundreds of partners each year to review upcoming titles.
“Last year, we worked with over 50 teams to sign their first Game Pass deal. This year marks our largest investment in Game Pass to date, and we remain focused on delivering the most exciting and diverse catalogue in gaming.”
Xbox has received criticism for Game Pass in recent months. Arkane Studios founder Raphael Colantonio described the service as “an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade”.
In a back and forth on social media on the “cannibalisation” of sales, Larian director of publishing Michael Douse added “smaller teams with new or riskier” games can benefit from Game Pass, but he prefers “Sony’s ‘lifecycle management'” method of adding games following initial sales.
Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden discussed the perceived profitability of Game Pass in a discussion with GamesIndustry.biz. “There’s a lot of debates going on,” he said. “Is Game Pass profitable? Is Game Pass not profitable? What does that mean? That’s really not the right question to ask anyway.
“You can do all kinds of financial jiggery-pokery for any sort of corporate service to make it look profitable if you wanted to. You take enough costs out and say that’s off the balance sheet and, oh look, it’s profitable now. The real issue for me on things like Game Pass is, is it healthy for the developer?”
Meanwhile, Football Manager boss Miles Jacobson recently told Eurogamer player numbers for the series have skyrocketed since being added to subscription platforms.
“We built a whole business model around it,” he said. “You can’t just turn around and do this – this was before we launched on the subscription platforms, we’d been talking about it. And we’d been working out what we were going to do for five years – it was a five-year journey before we went with the first experiment, and then we did another experiment, and then we did another experiment, and then we learned from those experiments, and that’s when the full strategy was put in place.”
In a broader interview with Eurogamer on the state of indie games on Xbox, Charla noted the breadth of games showcased by Xbox at Gamescom. “It is just really a recognition by Xbox of the absolute crucial need for diversity in our portfolio,” he said.
