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?
The difference is that there are other 10 games per genre at least, that are fighting for your time so your game still needs to be good.
I will say that only reason I own an XSX over the PS5 is indeed GP, in last 2 years only games I actually bought were Fromsoft titles which I basically buy on every system. I have had more thank 2k hours worth of fun over probably 20+ games on GP and I still haven’t tried all that I want.
If anything, at least for me GP is the polar opposite of you are proposing, what you are talking about is Epic Games Store which is full of shovelware and low effort shit.
Yes the requirements are technically lower for quality, but we live in a world where 70$ “premium price AAA game” like COD is unplayable for weeks, so correlation between quality and price means nothing in this industry in 2023.
I mean Vampire Survivors is literally like less than 5$ and it is more creative and waaaay more polished and well made than like 70% of modern premium price AAA games.
I haven’t had a single game on GP that I haven’t finished or liked so far, also it provides me with like 10+ party games for when my homies come, I dread of thinking how would we have fun on PS5 or a PC without GP for only 15$. I legit cannot go back just for this reason alone.
To answer your question, absolutely not, as a 2 year user of it proposing something like this means you haven’t actually tried the service out. While theoretically it makes sense, in reality and practice its just not true.