Hot on the heels of the layoffs, which swept through the Xbox, founder of Arkane Studios belonging to Microsoft, hit the game pass, whose subscription model he called “unbalanced”.
Raphael Colantonio, who founded the disgraced and victim of the developer and served as the president before leaving in 2017 to set up a strange Wolfeye Studios, Wolfeye Studios, He got to social media to ask: “Why nobody talks about elephant in the room? Cough (gamepas).”
Asked to develop his thoughts on Game Pass, in which the strange West started straight as the title of the first day in March 2022, Colantonio said: “I think that GamePass is an unbalanced model that has been increasingly destroying the industry for a decade, subsidized by” infinite money “of multiple sclerosis”
Colantonio’s commentary caused a deafening debate on the advantages and defects of Game Pass, both in terms of industry and the client. The Microsoft subscription has been called many things for years: the death of the video game industry; Savior of smaller programmers who significantly operate Microsoft payments to secure their games; And everything in between. During the great Xbox FTC attempt, deciding about the fate of Microsoft with a value of $ 69 billion Microsoft Activision Blizzard, head of PlayStation Jim Ryan, claimed that he talked to “all publishers” and that everyone had a unanimously hated a pass to the game. “
It was four years ago. And what now, after the cuts that Everwild Rare saw, the perfect dark restart and unannounced MMO in the work in the program behind the older Scrolls online, all canceled?
Colantonio comments were supported by many industry peers, including Former Biz Dev Vice President at Epic Games. Michael Duse, publishing director at Baldur’s Gate 3 Developer Larian, he said This is the biggest problem turns around what happens when all this money ends. This, added Duse, is “one of the main economic reasons that I know that they did not go to their business model. Infinite money has never made sense.”
(It is worth noting that Baldur’s Gate 3 has not yet appeared in Game Pass or PlayStation Plus.)
Then Colantonio ridiculed Microsoft’s insistence that the launch of games to Game Pass did not affect sales, just to admit the opposite.
Extinguish replied To say that he prefers how to do Sony things. Sony PlayStation Plus policy is to keep the first page outside the subscription service during the premiere, adding them only a little later. That’s why you won’t see this year’s premiere of Sony’s Ghost of Yotei straight in PS Plus, but you’ll see Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 as the premiere of the first game.
“Economics never made sense, but at the same time I understand that in the case of smaller teams with up-to-date or more risky IP addresses, the deriska helped,” said Doouse. “Sony’s” life cycle management “strategy.”
“Yes, the only way GP can coexist without harming everyone is the rear catalog,” Colantonio saved.
List of the Xbox Games series
List of the Xbox Games series
Reports indicate that Microsoft’s layoffs concerned a more deafening pushing company to AI than any defeat in the gaming industry, but Colantonio suggested It was a “BS excuse”.
Then he insisted that “mathematics would not work for most publishers/developers or for Xbox when they stop investing.”
Colantonio was also asked why Microsoft would continue to push Pass Game if he were unbalanced, even now eight years after its launch. He replied that Game Pass is not profitable, Microsoft is still in the “customer acquisition phase”, and the company hopes that one day subscription revenues will cause that his significant investment will pay off.
Colantonio explained that the game pass cannot be considered profitable, because billions of dollars should be included, which Microsoft spent on the purchase of content for the subscription service, and in this equation contains the owner of Bethesda Zenimax and Activision Blizzard. “This is a trick in a spreadsheet, in which they do not present this details in the profit and loss section, but instead in depreciation,” he said.
Game Pass is of course an amazing offer for a player that allows subscribers to immerse and leave the long list of games for a fraction of the costs of purchasing these independent games. Game Pass is often too good to be true because of how cheap it is in relation to what it offers. When you upload every game that Microsoft has its books as the premiere of the first game (including Call of Duty), the contract seems even better.
However, for Colantonio, the game contract is “too good”.
“What * can happen after winning MS: Games will start sucking and your submarine will boost,” he added. “Why? Because the current amazing offer you have, gives way to a lady who bleeds money in the hope that they will kill the competition, but when you can do it, things will happen.”
He added: “… it’s a long game that involves throwing tsunami into the entire industry ecosystem. Only players like it because the offer is too good to be true, but in the end even players will hate her when they are aware of the influence of games.”
Microsoft does not report the success of Game Pass in any way in financial terms. Indeed, his reports on games are at best unclear. In the last financial report (in the quarter ending on March 31, 2025), Microsoft said that the content and Xbox services and services increased by 8% year on year, which was partly caused by the increase in Xbox Game Pass. Revenues from PC games increased by 45% year on year. But we do not have an updated character for the number of Game Pass subscribers, or how much money it brings.
In an April interview for DiversityThe head of games Microsoft, Phil Spencer, was asked how he believes the ongoing role of Game Pass in a larger Xbox industry. Spencer replied that he thought Pass Pass is a “vigorous option for some people”, but he admitted that “this is not for everyone.”
“Our largest growth areas are now PC and Cloud, which makes sense, because consoles are a good business, they are recognized companies, but they are not really a growing segment in games,” he said.
“So we have a good growth on PC, we have a cloud growth when it comes to users and hours. And Console is still a really vigorous part of Game Pass. But there is no unique need for Pass to be the only way to play.
“For me I look at the Pass game as a healthy option for some people. This is not for everyone. If you play one or two games a year, Game Pass is probably not the right business model for you, you should simply buy these two games, and it would make sense. But I want you to have a choice. So we focus on everything that is on the game is also available.
“I look at the overall hours of people who play Xbox, play our games, and this is a number that is still growing, and this is really a record that I think about success. And Game Pass was an crucial part of this, but I don’t try to solve the game pass.
Wesley is a director, news in IGN. Find it on Twitter on @św100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpole@ign.com or confidentially at spine@proton.me.
