Ahead of our interview with ID@Xbox director Chris Charla, we asked a few independent developers and publishers how they were feeling about Xbox.
The responses were largely very positive. The ID@Xbox programme – now celebrating its tenth anniversary – continues to be a success, and teams had nothing but good things to say about how Xbox works with them. But, as you'd expect, there were a few questions and concerns. And every single one of those was about one thing: Game Pass.
"Business people being worried about the direction of the business is a perfectly normal, natural, and healthy thing," Charla tells us during last week's Game Developer Conference..
"When free-to-play came to consoles, there were a lot of people who thought this was going to completely change everything, every game will become free-to-play and nobody will be able to get people to purchase a video game again. But that's not what happened. But were those concerns valid, rational, normal, and healthy? Absolutely. It is all our jobs in the games industry to take those concerns seriously, to think about them, and work together to make the industry work."
Charla says that concerns over subscriptions and how it might disrupt the games business isn't something that Xbox is seeing in its data.
"I wouldn't describe it as disruptive, because I don't think it is in the way that like Uber came in and got rid of all the taxis in that industry," Charla tells us.
"It's additive. People still buy a lot of games and they still buy a lot of games on Xbox. They buy games through Game Pass at a discount, which is what they get as members. And so I don't think Game Pass has been a disruptive business model, it's been additive in a really positive way. And we as an industry needs to look at more of those additive business models. A bit like digital distribution, that may have been somewhat disruptive to the retail space, but it was ultimately additive because not every game needed to be of the size to justify being on a disc.""People still buy a lot of games and they still buy a lot of games on Xbox"
The introduction of digital downloading is an interesting comparison, because turn back the clock 15 years, and the argument was that digital was additive to the traditional retail business. Back then, most players bought games in boxes, so if there was suddenly a lot of talk and excitement around a specific game – perhaps because of a digital promotion, or the introduction of some DLC – it would result in a sales bump at physical retail.
That all changed when digital downloading started to accelerate and took a larger share of the market. So although Game Pass may be additive right now, is Charla convinced that will remain the case in the future?
"I do think it will," he says. "We see Game Pass players play more games, engage with more games in more genres than they've ever engaged with. Those kind-of metrics is what we saw at the beginning of Game Pass, and every time we look we still see it. So yeah, I remain super hopeful about it. When we see developers coming to us and talking to us about second, third, fourth and fifth games in Game Pass, it's clearly working for them. That's good extrinsic validation about the value of the programme."
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/xboxs-chris-charla-game-pass-isnt-disruptive