Game Pass creates an ecosystem where developers are not valued and rewarded, says ex-Bethesda and Microsoft exec Pete Hines

LakeOf9

Member


"I'm involved enough to know I saw what I considered to be some short sighted decision making several years ago, and it seems to be bearing out the way I said. Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can't buy a product anymore. When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don't figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content – without which your subscription is worth jack shit – then you have a real problem. You need to properly acknowledge, compensate and recognize what it takes to create that content and not just make a game, but make a product. That tension is hurting a lot of people, including the content creators themselves, because they're fitting into an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding what they're making."

 
Ex employee is bitter?

Cbs What GIF by The Late Late Show with James Corden
 
Eh. Xbox is 3rd party now, and their games will eventually be landing day 1 on PS5 and (when feasible) Switch 2. No Gamepass there.
PC gamers have also mostly stuck to retail purchases via Steam.

There's really no excuse

But I think he's also speaking in context of studios like Tango where HiFi Rush sales took a hit from GamePass, and then likely the retail revenue was used as a justification for the studio closure. Poor decision making from MS for that.
 
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It's not hard to understand. Any value games had or appreciation is severely diminished with consumption models like subscriptions. Game development changes with short cuts, cut content etc etc to keep up with the content needed.

Also developers don't get rewarded and laid off as it's more difficult to make any ROI. Players logging in for 5 minutes, doesn't help them.
 


TL;DR:
Pete Hines criticizes subscription services like Xbox Game Pass for not properly valuing game developers. He argues that the economics of subscriptions often fail to fairly reward the people creating content, creating tension that hurts developers. While subscriptions are popular and profitable, Hines warns they can lead to real problems for creators if the balance between service providers and content creators isn't managed.


Pete Hines Quotes:
  1. "What I considered to be some short-sighted decision making several years ago, and it seems to be bearing out the way I said."
  2. "Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can't buy a product anymore. When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don't figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content—without which your subscription is worth jack sht—then you have a real problem."
  3. "Properly acknowledge, compensate, and recognize what it takes to create that content and not just make a game, but make a product."
  4. "Hurting a lot of people," (referring to developers impacted by subscription economics)
  5. "Because they're fitting into an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding what they're making."
  6. Hines said his main issue with a subscription service like Game Pass or others is that the economics might not always make sense--and that's a critical point in a world with mass layoffs, studio closures, and game cancellations.



What can you say when a service and entire strategy meant to propel Xbox to the top of the console, platform, and ecosystem race ends up doing the exact opposite, the writing is on the wall
 
Only 3 execs have ever been fired from MS games. Bonnie Ross, Mike "Prize Picks" Ybarra, and this guy.

I get the sense that MS was hands off with Bethesda still at that point. It was likely him telling them that Redfall was ready to go. I dont really trust much from him at this point.

My last concern is "valuing developers." Thats an entirely empty platitude that means literally nothing. They are still getting paid. They get their checks. If games do change slightly to be shorter, and have better intros to appeal to busy people with an abundance of media, that seems like a great thing to me. Many games are unnaturally long, open world, and safe specifically because of the influence of retail so any counter acting force to that is a positive thing. He even says the tik tok gen has shorter attention span than ever. No shit. There will always be long games, but not all games need to be insanely long and bloated.

Starfield is one of the longest games this gen. It was day 1 on Gamepass. Same with Oblivion remastered. Dragon Age just hit GP. Clair Obscur. The unnaturally long metroidvania Hollow Knight 2 is on GP. Indiana Jones was on GP and isn't a short game either. Avowed was on GP. Ninja Gaiden 4 is next month.
 
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Late to the hate, choro.


 
I still feel it's a great idea(Game Pass) but everyone/industry is against MS right now.
Are you a developer? He isn't saying Game Pass is bad for customers. He is saying it is bad for the talent if it is run in a way that does not reward the talent that is driving the content. Of course customers are going to think cheap access to games is a great idea. It benefits them.
 
Subs work for some companies and content, and sometimes it doesnt.

Fallout 76 has a sub plan option and Pete was part of the game. So he loves sub plans too when it's part of his game. MS hadnt bought Bethesda yet. It was Bethesda's own idea.

Despite various companies having game sub plans, only some have day one games in a premium tier. I think it's just MS, UBI and EA who have a day one tier for first party games. I might be wrong though and there's more.

UBI has tanked lately, but EA is doing great. While UBI's stock and financials are at lows, EA's are at/near all time highs. MS is harder to gauge since you cant split out Xbox from MS reports, but theyre still humming with day one games like Hollow Knight Silksong. I dont see everyone buying GP to get that game for a download. People are buying it now instead of waiting for GP and PS+ like HK 1 came about later on. Probably because it's a good game and people trust it'll be a good sequel.

Problem for studios is if they got a shitty game nobody trusts to buy at launch. So they wait for it on sub plan or a 70% off bargain sale. Lots of games out there sell fine even when everyone knows it may or may not come to sub plan in 12 months.
 
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Pete wasn't on board with Starfield or Indy on GamePass so he had to go.

And of course he was right, so I kinda understand why he is low-key gloating right now. CoD showed us that even the most popular shooter on the planet barely moves a needle for a Netflix model in gaming, but it royally screwing with talent and tangible AAA profits.
 
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Are you a developer? He isn't saying Game Pass is bad for customers. He is saying it is bad for the talent if it is run in a way that does not reward the talent that is driving the content. Of course customers are going to think cheap access to games is a great idea. It benefits them.
Not a developer. At the same time, I personally don't use Game Pass.

I don't know how game developers are paid, but I would guess it's no different from a hourly wage/salary based employment. In that case, if your only end goal is to come out on top monetarily...and not to put out a top tier gaming product...it probably shouldn't turn out well in most cases.

I would again guess sales numbers/figures would produce bonuses and the actual "reward" in the end of gaming development as you see the fruits of your labor being paid off.

Quite literally.
 
You know what else hurts the value of people making games...when you let them repeatedly release a buggy broken product to consumers...which he let happen multiple times in a row.

He's only against Game Pass because the sub revenue is diluted amongst multiple developers, instead of all going to one like Fallout 76's subscription service.
 
You know what else hurts the value of people making games...when you let them repeatedly release a buggy broken product to consumers...which he let happen multiple times in a row.

He's only against Game Pass because the sub revenue is diluted amongst multiple developers, instead of all going to one like Fallout 76's subscription service.
No doubt.

I like a lot of Bethesda games: ES, FO and going back in time Wayne Gretzky Hockey 1 and 2 on PC.

But if there's one thing about Bethesda games which are surely a drain on people, reputation and gamer's time is buggy crap. And I think just about everyone will agree the game company with consistently the buggiest games in history are Bethesda.

For those of you who never played those old ass hockey games, they were by far the buggiest sports games I ever played. I could write pages how bad the bugs, stats and AI are. And the worst UI ever. After you played a game and checked out stats, you'd exit the screen to save game on another screen. But what they did was when you exit to the next screen, they'd put your cursor on top of the Exit Game option. So if you accidentally double tap or hold down the button too long on the past page, you'd exit the game and lose all your stats and chance to save your game. So then you'd have to replay the game and hope to not do that again.

Braniac menu screen UI there.

But similar to ES and FO, it had awesome things about it that no other hockey games had at the time (or even for years when EA games came out on Genesis and PC)..... it had huge scope of stats and management options (esp if you got the league commissioner's expansion disc). It looked and sounded like crap, but you could do all sorts of things like all NHL teams and players, edit player stats, salary cap, create your own lines and plays etc....
 
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TL;DR:
Pete Hines criticizes subscription services like Xbox Game Pass for not properly valuing game developers. He argues that the economics of subscriptions often fail to fairly reward the people creating content, creating tension that hurts developers. While subscriptions are popular and profitable, Hines warns they can lead to real problems for creators if the balance between service providers and content creators isn't managed.


Pete Hines Quotes:
  1. "What I considered to be some short-sighted decision making several years ago, and it seems to be bearing out the way I said."
  2. "Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can't buy a product anymore. When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don't figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content—without which your subscription is worth jack sht—then you have a real problem."
  3. "Properly acknowledge, compensate, and recognize what it takes to create that content and not just make a game, but make a product."
  4. "Hurting a lot of people," (referring to developers impacted by subscription economics)
  5. "Because they're fitting into an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding what they're making."
  6. Hines said his main issue with a subscription service like Game Pass or others is that the economics might not always make sense--and that's a critical point in a world with mass layoffs, studio closures, and game cancellations.



What can you say when a service and entire strategy meant to propel Xbox to the top of the console, platform, and ecosystem race ends up doing the exact opposite, the writing is on the wall

His ass got fired by Microsoft just like the previous Activision CEO did (mark ibarra), they both will not pull any punches now that they burned their bridges.
 
Game subs are good for devs if game subs represent a small part of the market revenue and playtime, and they only include old games, so doesn't negatively affect the sales of new games.

To include AAA games day one in a sub is a suicide for the devs because it's impossible to make the game profitable. So yes, he's right regarding Gamepass, it's a poison for companies like Bethesda and the reason of why they did shut down studios recently.
 
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Balance between creators and those running the service needs to be maintained.

Which is correct, he doesn't say gamepass doesn't do it.

I have read a fair few times xbox is fair with compensation.
 
Is a six figure salary not proper compensation for devs?

Xbox isn't the largest platform, there are at least three bigger platforms, PlayStation, Nintendo, Steam which don't have Gamepass and need to rely on sales as usual.

So how is Gamepass hurting sales on those platforms? That's the entire reason why MS is going multi platform. Because those other platform sales revenues can fully subsidize the first and 2nd party content for Gamepass for Xbox users.

Indies are not mandated to be on Gamepass, it fully covers their dev costs if they choose to do a Day One launch. Silksong dev costs were likely fully subsidized by Gamepass even before a single sale. Yet they're all allowed to sell on other platforms as well, for pure profits.

AAA third parties don't really join Gamepass for at least 12-36 months. EA has a policy of 12 months wait before going into EA Play, Ubisoft has policy of 18 months wait at least. Others could be longer as Cyberpunk has never been on Gamepass after 4.5 years.

So what devs aren't being properly compensated?
 
People need to understand when people like Pete Hines, Shawn Layden etc. make these statement there talking from the stand point of if Microsoft had been successful in distrupting the market instead of distrupting is own platform. We could 10x the current Gamepass number sub count and we still be short of number needs to justify all the investments made in market.

There's a reason why Microsoft pivoted to releasing games on Playstation and Nintendo platforms. It was the only way to justify the investment they made when they bought 2 publisher.

Balance between creators and those running the service needs to be maintained.

Which is correct, he doesn't say gamepass doesn't do it.

I have read a fair few times xbox is fair with compensation.

According to who. I mean we saw what they estimated it would cost to get Baldurs Gate 3 in gamepass. Is that a fair amount knowing what we know now.

Is a six figure salary not proper compensation for devs?

Xbox isn't the largest platform, there are at least three bigger platforms, PlayStation, Nintendo, Steam which don't have Gamepass and need to rely on sales as usual.

So how is Gamepass hurting sales on those platforms? That's the entire reason why MS is going multi platform. Because those other platform sales revenues can fully subsidize the first and 2nd party content for Gamepass for Xbox users.

Indies are not mandated to be on Gamepass, it fully covers their dev costs if they choose to do a Day One launch. Silksong dev costs were likely fully subsidized by Gamepass even before a single sale. Yet they're all allowed to sell on other platforms as well, for pure profits.

AAA third parties don't really join Gamepass for at least 12-36 months. EA has a policy of 12 months wait before going into EA Play, Ubisoft has policy of 18 months wait at least. Others could be longer as Cyberpunk has never been on Gamepass after 4.5 years.

So what devs aren't being properly compensated?

I didn't know Gamepass generated enough revenue to cover the cost of AAA such as Hogwarts Legacy, Suicide Squad, Madden, EAFC. Developers only get six figure salaries because they can produce products that 1000x that salary. They're aren't enough subscribers to the support the investments the entire market as made.
In a world where Gamepass met Microsoft expectations, is also a world where 3rd party games could no longer be sold a la carte because the product would have been devalued.
Indie developers who aren't in gamepass will tell you how difficult it is monetise Microsoft platform due to the audience being conditioned by Gamepass. You know who benefits when the only way to monetise an audience is getting a check from the platform holder? Hint hint it's not the developer.
So only you concede the only way for games Microsoft own studios to be successful is to monetize platform where the subscription is not available.
We can see from Microsoft actions that the need to release a games on other platforms. If those platforms didn't exist or those to force to go the sub route to because the market dictate it who's going to make up for lost revenue? Hint hint it definitely won't be the platform holder i.e see layoffs.
 
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Is a six figure salary not proper compensation for devs?

Xbox isn't the largest platform, there are at least three bigger platforms, PlayStation, Nintendo, Steam which don't have Gamepass and need to rely on sales as usual.

So how is Gamepass hurting sales on those platforms? That's the entire reason why MS is going multi platform. Because those other platform sales revenues can fully subsidize the first and 2nd party content for Gamepass for Xbox users.

Indies are not mandated to be on Gamepass, it fully covers their dev costs if they choose to do a Day One launch. Silksong dev costs were likely fully subsidized by Gamepass even before a single sale. Yet they're all allowed to sell on other platforms as well, for pure profits.

AAA third parties don't really join Gamepass for at least 12-36 months. EA has a policy of 12 months wait before going into EA Play, Ubisoft has policy of 18 months wait at least. Others could be longer as Cyberpunk has never been on Gamepass after 4.5 years.

So what devs aren't being properly compensated?
Thats the thing.

Because nobody knows what the GP fee is for games, all the haters assume the devs gets nothing or is somehow taken advantage of with a low ball amount. When in reality, all third party games have a choice to day one it or not. No different than a third party dev putting it on GP or PS+ a year or two later. Who knows, maybe Team Cherry got a giant sum from MS upfront. That can be true too.

If day one sub plans are so bad for gaming, UBI and EA wouldnt have day one sub tiers either. And all third party studios would never do day one. Yet many smaller scale studios will do day one on GP or PS+.

The key difference is MS first party. It's great value to gamers to add it into the higher tiers. And because Sony and Nintendo dont do it, it makes their sub services look weaker when you;'d think the two companies doing better should have better sub plans. You also dont see anyone complain about UBI or EA premium day one tiers because those are third party companies as opposed to platform holders. So some reason it's ok when they do it. You never hear anyone talk about their plans cannibalizing Ass Creed or FIFA/Madden or BF sales.
 
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According to who. I mean we saw what they estimated it would cost to get Baldurs Gate 3 in gamepass. Is that a fair amount knowing what we know now.


"That being said, Sala is still positive about the service and believes that for developers lucky enough to be given a slot, it can be hugely beneficial. "These things are up to the gods in Redmond and if you get in it's generally a very positive thing for a dev, especially in indie. They are more than fair in compensation and you get a huge audience.""
 

"That being said, Sala is still positive about the service and believes that for developers lucky enough to be given a slot, it can be hugely beneficial. "These things are up to the gods in Redmond and if you get in it's generally a very positive thing for a dev, especially in indie. They are more than fair in compensation and you get a huge audience.""
Of course he'd be positive about the service. It's free money and attention for his irrelevant game that would otherwise go unnoticed. He benefits. AAA publishers do not.

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Oh so it's cause of this that they cut off that many developers in these years? Yesterday was AI's fault and now game pass 😂 how laughable, bug publishers are raising prices everywhere and laying off many people from the industry ans destroying creativity but the fault goes to a subscription that let you play for cheap. Develpers in USA can't even form an union just a little while ago. Most are forced to create live service and can't even have ideas cause they need to bring further franchise series over and over
 
Late to the hate, choro.
Thats all you got?

You don't need to be a brain surgeon to understand the tension between all you can eat products and quality. One of the key drivers of the success of subscription models is driving costs down.

Pretty much the only really succesful TV subscription in quality terms to me is ATV+. And thats only because they see it as an expense rather than a profit centre. GP was the same early on, now it has to be a profit centre and guess what? Prices rise, cuts happen on the content side etc etc. PS+ is similar to GP, except it doesn't have the day 1 albatross hanging around its neck. But you still see those price rises!

Looking forward to an honest clear throated reply from you... nah its fully lodged.
 
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Thats all you got?

It's the nicest way to tell him it's already posted. Cage the rage, homeboy.


His ass got fired by Microsoft just like the previous Activision CEO did (mark ibarra), they both will not pull any punches now that they burned their bridges.

He sure did appreciate it when he was still employed at the company.


In an interview with Major Nelson, Todd Howard and Pete Hines of Bethesda talked about how much they appreciate Xbox Game Pass.
 
Late to the hate, choro.



The more the merrier 😉
 
Are you a developer? He isn't saying Game Pass is bad for customers. He is saying it is bad for the talent if it is run in a way that does not reward the talent that is driving the content. Of course customers are going to think cheap access to games is a great idea. It benefits them.
It must suck being a developer and putting 4-6 years of your life into a game just to throw it in a service where 60% of the people will play it for less an hour and say "meh" and never touch it again.

Meanwhile other developers release their game and it gets millions of sales and they potentially get bonuses for increased sales performances
 
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Xbox is 3rd party now, and their games will eventually be landing day 1 on PS5 and (when feasible) Switch 2. No Gamepass there.
Precisely, this quote feels like it's coming a year too late.

The reality now is that there is no Gamepass for hundreds of millions of users…

If devs still aren't making money and feel rewarded at this point it's because the games they're making isn't appealing to the target audience. Start fixing that problem instead of complaining about the 20M fraction of your potential audience that use a subscription service.
 
The irony is that Exclusives are the thing Game Pass would need in order to have a chance of existing long term.
In my opinion, exclusive titles would actually hurt Game Pass. People would just subscribe for a single month, while Microsoft would miss out on millions of dollars from day-one releases on PS5 and Switch.
Financially, the best approach would be to launch games on PS5 and Switch 2 right away, while holding back from putting them on Game Pass at day one. Instead, first-party games should be added to the service only after 3–6 months.
 
Late to the hate, choro.




 
In my opinion, exclusive titles would actually hurt Game Pass. People would just subscribe for a single month, while Microsoft would miss out on millions of dollars from day-one releases on PS5 and Switch.
Financially, the best approach would be to launch games on PS5 and Switch 2 right away, while holding back from putting them on Game Pass at day one. Instead, first-party games should be added to the service only after 3–6 months.
forget about consoles for a moment. let's say consoles are done. You have only apps on your TV, Phone, PC..... what is going to make you open one app over the other?......Tha same reason a person opens Netflix to watch squid game or Amazon to watch a James Bond movie or Disney+ to watch The Mandalorian.... you know, Exclsuvie content.


as long as you can acces games on other platforms, Game Pass will be a burden to the entire industry and developers too
 
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