Arkane Studios founder, Raphael Colantonio, has taken to social media to voice their opinion Game Pass. The Game Pass model remains a divided thing amongst gamers and developers, with some singing its praises for bringing more eyes to the game, while others lament its faults, especially for smaller developers.
On Twitter, Colantonio, who’s now the creative director at WolfEye Games, responded to a fan’s question on their thoughts on Game Pass, to which they were brutally honest that the model is unsustainable and has been “damaging the industry for a decade.” It’s only made worse by Microsoft’s “infinite money” and that eventually the GP model will either kill everything else or give up.
Further discussion was done with Larian Studios’ publishing director, Michael Douse, who addressed that money is a big issue cause people aren’t paying for the game, thus the dev isn’t getting potentially as much money as it could without the service. It does help “derisk” new IPs for smaller devs, but that’s about it.
It’s important to consider that while Game Pass is a phenomenal thing for the consumer — access to a huge catalog of games, some of which would never have graced your library otherwise, is great but it’s not as good of a deal for developers. Even a AA developer will see a player on Game Pass as a potential lost sale as Microsoft doesn’t have any real incentive to encourage people purchase the game.
In contrast, though, Jason Kingsley of Rebellion, which is hot off the release of Atomfall (read our review here), sees value in the engagement it can get from Game Pass.
