Shawn Layden, former chairman of PlayStation Worldwide Studios, blew up game subscription services such as Xbox Game Pass, like bad for the video games and developers – who, as he said, can be transformed into “wage slaves”.
Talking with Gamesindustry.bizLayden criticized the influence of the Xbox Game Pass, becoming “netflix games”, suggesting that it led to a novel norm in which paying for individual games became less common-in time when huge live services, such as Roblox and Fortnite, have already devoured comments and expenses for the player.
Layden also had a criticism of the influence that the game launch on the subscription service had on their programmers, and the titles simply become content for the subscription catalog.
“I am not a great supporter of the idea of” Netflix of Gaming “,” said Layden. “I think this is a danger. I mean what happened to music. In the popular mind, music costs nothing. Music should be free. Spotify, what is it? It’s 15 bucks a month or something like that, but practically no one buys music anymore.”
Although this is not a thorough comparison, Layden suggests that the ubiquity of music via the stream transmission catalogs devalued individual editions. But although the music industry can adapt to the make-up of live concerts, the same can not be said about video games, which makes the game on the day run through the “bad” subscription service.
“The problem with the game is everything we have is launching,” continued Layden. “That’s all. Nobody wants to pay money to enter the studio and watch the Code of People.”
Recently, many discussions have been held about the Xbox Game Pass profitability, about which Microsoft himself earns money, even taking into account the costs of developing games that appear in it, and the lost sales of first -page games, for which people no longer have to pay individually. But, Layden insisted, the profitability of all this is not a real problem.
“Is the classified game profitable? Is the play of the game not profitable? What does it mean? This is not the right question to ask,” he said. “You can do all kinds of financial-career so that any corporate service will look profitable if you want. You pull out enough costs and say that it is beyond the balance and, oh, it is profitable. It is profitable. A real problem in matters such as the card, is it healthy for a developer?”
It was here that Layden described programmers working on launching games in subscription as basically becoming a “pay slave”.
“They do not create values, they place it on the market, hoping that he exploded, sharing profits, excessively and all these nice things,” said Layden. “It’s just:” You pay me x dollars per hour, I built a game here, put it on my servers. ” I don’t think it is really inspiring for game developers. “
Regardless, the Xbox Game Pass remains a huge factor for Microsoft, which in June said that the subcutaneous service achieved a novel annual revenue record from “almost $ 5 billion” for the first time, after the introduction of senior ganglia: Oblivion: Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Tom Phillips is the editor of Ign. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on BlueSky @tomphillipseg.bsky.Social
