Xbox Game Pass is one of the latest set gaming subscription models within the market, and it rapidly increased its popularity in the last couple of months. Ed Fries (Ex Microsoft executive) believes this kind of service will completely change the nature of the video game market.
Opinions about the Xbox Game Pass have been quite controversial from the industry’s point of view. When Microsoft’s gaming division decided to develop and launch the subscription service, nobody would have predicted its enormous fast success. However, it quickly won over the fans thanks to its affordable charge.
The service itself offers a broad variety of games to its subscribers for a rather low fee. The library includes games from all genres and even day one releases from studio partners. It also includes all AAA games owned by Xbox/Microsoft, which makes it a great deal for any player. All of these are mainly the positives that make the service quite popular within the gaming community. Fries mentioned ,since its inception, the Xbox Game Pass has grown exponentially and managed to gather 25 million subscribers at the start of 2022.
The community is quite happy that they are able to play such a different array of games without investing a 60$ plus amount per game. However Fries has shared a comparison that makes economic sense to most of the businessmen within the industry.
The former Microsoft executive says that the service could have the same impact as Spotify. You might be thinking that is an unimaginable comparison, it is by numbers but not by mentality.
Fries via Twitter:
“When Spotify took off it destroyed the music business, it literally cut the annual revenue of the music business in half. It’s made it so people just don’t buy songs anymore.”
Fries believes that a similar situation might happen within the gaming ecosystem, ending as a problematic state due to the fragile nature of the overall market.
Fries further clarified via Twitter:
“So we have to be careful we don’t create the same system in the game business. These markets are more fragile than people realise. I saw the games industry destroy itself in the early 80s. I saw the educational software business destroy itself in the mid-90s… they literally destroyed a multi-billion dollar market in a few years.”
“The percentage of all games that are on Game Pass is still tiny, and there are a lot of games. 200 games a week come out on Steam and more than that come out on mobile.”
Currently the Xbox Game Pass retires games as well thanks to a variety of factors, either a developer no longer wants the game within the service or the game is not popular enough. As players we definitely prefer to keep such a service as it currently stands, however the overall business has a different approach as technically we are receiving a huge amount of value for less than usual price.
