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Does the prevalence of Game Passes disincentivise game studios to make great games? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by fresh2112@alien.top to c/gaming@level-up.zone

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I'm interested in the economics of it, and I'm no expert so would be great for some insight.

In years gone by, the quality and popularity of a game would directly correlate to it's sales. Whereas for gamepass games, I assume that studios get a kick back percentage of revenue for installs, play hours, etc.

As the investment needed by a player to install is zero (barring a download and install, it's all sunk cost from already having a gamepass), their threshold to try a game is a lot lower, therefore the requirements for the studio to ensure high quality is much lower for a similar return on investment. (I.e. more speculative downloads with lower return than lower hard sales with higher return).

What do you think?

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[–] SuperGamerNerdKrn@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Here's the reality of the economics. It's not free to host a server. it's not cheap to host a server. the reason why online games in the past were free was because the peers were hosting it. 1 person hosted the lobby, everybody joined it, and they were strained by his connection.

This was why games like World of Warcraft had subscriptions but games like call of duty 1 through 4 didn't.

Battlepass is just another model of subscription. It runs on the principle that you only need a handful of suckers who will buy the battle pass to make it free for everybody else instead of charging every player 15 dollars a month.

But believe me, if everybody in the world stopped buying fortnite battle passes and skins, epic games would either shut down the game, include adware and datamining and take a facebook/google approach to profiting off your data, or just straight up go to a 15 dollar a month subscription.