His point about devaluation strikes true to me.
I have PlayStation plus premium, but I still spend about £1500/yr on software for the ps5.
Yet since buying the seriesX a couple year ago, I’ve not bought a single game. “I’ll just get it on gamespass”
I’m an upper income 40yr old, so am not price sensitive and have had 40 years of gaming to expect that games are “bought” and the associated value proposition. Yet even I have been trained not to buy games on xbox.
Kids and teens playing now are price sensitive, so this will be even more acute for them. They will be spending their entire gaming life in a world where the value perception of games is “they are free with a relatively cheap subscription”, this value perception grows ever more acute the more major IP and studios microsoft swallow. In a decade that audience will be the primary spenders, and they will have been trained implicitly NOT to buy games.
Microsoft is also approaching it from a loss leader perspective paying out huge sums for games to secure them for gamespass, tho those values would still be a long way from covering development costs. The amount they are offering won’t be sustained as they make it attractive in its own right with first party IP. This is all happening under the shadow of exploding development costs.
Short term I can see devs seeing benefits from it, but long term I struggle to see how it won’t be hugely damaging to third party devs…unless they cram their games with other ways to monetise them after releasing on gamespass. Those disruptive forces will also make more studios more open to the relative safety of acquisition, further consolidating the market.
Anyhow, just my thoughts on it…we won’t really see the real impact of this stuff for another decade.