I’m interested in the economics of it, and I’m no expert so would be great for some insight.
In years gone by, the quality and popularity of a game would directly correlate to it’s sales. Whereas for gamepass games, I assume that studios get a kick back percentage of revenue for installs, play hours, etc.
As the investment needed by a player to install is zero (barring a download and install, it’s all sunk cost from already having a gamepass), their threshold to try a game is a lot lower, therefore the requirements for the studio to ensure high quality is much lower for a similar return on investment. (I.e. more speculative downloads with lower return than lower hard sales with higher return).
What do you think?
I think Microsoft themselves have less incentive to make great games due to GP since subscribers are getting the game for “free” regardless, which in turn means it’s more cost effective for them to make a lot of cheaper games instead if going all out with bigger budgets.
For other studios, not really. Especially the smaller ones as they would generally try to use GP as a marketing tool to build their brand. They would be likely to try to make the best product possible so future projects can sell better and not need GP.
This just means that while any individual game is not punished or rewarded by being sucky (regardless of budget), overall GP depends on great quality of content. We saw this with movie streaming services, no one buys streaming service to watch loads of mediocre shows, but a few big ones are pulling it. The moment the service doesn’t provide great content in certain regularity…
This incentive the streaming platform owner to control quality at least for their flagship titles.
All in all, not that much different from existing digital stores (steam) or consoles (ps, Xbox and fight over better flagship title)