Game Pass seemed perfect

A focus on GamePass seemed like a good idea, but the company’s latest decisions have worried industry and users.

Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox have long competed in video game consoles. Some of their early success was due to exclusive titles: ‘Uncharted’ and ‘The Last of Us’ required a PlayStation, while ‘Halo’ and ‘Gears of War’ required an Xbox.

For years, things were even, but the Xbox One launch disaster sparked Sony. PlayStation 4 sales were 117.2 million versus Xbox One sales of 58 million.

Microsoft stopped providing sales figures a while ago, but Sony has sold 61.7 million next-gen consoles and Microsoft 21 million.

Three times as many, and the gap is growing because experts estimated five PS5s sold for every Xbox Series S/X in the second quarter. Disaster for Redmond. Previous generation Sony console sales were higher, but now the gap is growing.

Microsoft sought compensation for those losses. Game Pass, a monthly subscription service that lets players play a wide range of games, seemed to fit the bill.

Game Pass was popular because subscribers could play “house” games from the start, exclusive titles that had to be bought separately. Microsoft invested heavily in video game development studios, paying $7.5 billion for Bethesda Softworks and $69 billion for Activision Blizzard.

These acquisitions seemed to reaffirm Game Pass’s future by adding popular titles to an already good offer.

Then something happened.

Microsoft started making erratic decisions again. After a lengthy acquisition of Activision Blizzard, it fired 1,900 employees (8% of that division’s workforce) and announced successive development studio closures. It closed Arkane Austin (‘Redfall’), Tango Gameworks (‘Hi-Fi Rush’ and ‘The Evil Within’), and Alpha Dog Studios (‘Mighty DOOM’) after buying Bethesda. Therefore, what happens to those games?

Some will run alongside servers. Fortunately, Krafton recently acquired Tango Gameworks. Other games’ futures are uncertain, and Microsoft’s division is tense.

A few months ago, Xbox president Sarah Bond said she wanted to evaluate a video game’s long-term viability. She explained that the video game industry is struggling because its growth is not reflected in numbers:

“Over the last year or so, gaming has been pretty stagnant. Even in 2023, we saw some tremendous releases, groundbreaking games, but still, the growth hasn’t kept up with all of that. We need to attract new players and make games more accessible, but at the same time, the cost and time it takes to make these beautiful, blockbuster AAA games is rising.

Xbox’s focus is on helping the industry and ensuring that our brand is present in this moment of transition related to some of the trends you’re identifying.”
Other bold choices were unthinkable years ago. Microsoft announced in February that four of its exclusives would be coming to the PS5 and Nintendo Switch, and that strategy has been consolidated: ‘Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’, one of the most anticipated Xbox exclusives of the year, will be available for the PS5 in spring 2025. That sounds like what?

To lose.

Microsoft wants to maximise revenue by selling more copies of its exclusives on other consoles, but it removes the “hardware lock” that was necessary to play them. Gamers, Sony, and Nintendo benefit, but Microsoft? Harder to say.

Microsoft’s exclusive strategy is odd. Starfield isn’t expected to be available on PS5, but Indiana Jones will be on Sony’s console after a few months on Microsoft’s. In 2025, Xbox, PC, and PlayStation will release ‘DOOM: The Dark Ages’ simultaneously.

Other titles have confusing strategies. Obsidian, which Microsoft acquired in 2019, recently released PlayStation versions of’Pentiment’ and’Grounded’, but it has no plans to offer that alternative in its next game,’Avowed’, which will be released in February 2025 for Xbox and PC. Nobody is certain.

Game Pass seemed perfect

A focus on GamePass seemed like a good idea, but the company’s latest decisions have worried industry and users.

By triji

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