Reactions continue to trail last week’s sweeping layoff by Microsoft, which heavily impacted the gaming industry. Over the weekend, the founder of Arkane Studios and current president and creative director of WolfEye Studios, Raphael Colantonio, blamed Game Pass for the layoffs, calling it “the elephant in the room”.
Raphael Colantonio, ex-Arkane Studios founder
Colantonio co-directed the original Dishonored game before leaving Arkane Studios in 2019. When asked about his thoughts on the Game Pass model, Colantonio said it was unsustainable.
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“I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by MS’s ‘infinite money’, but at some point reality has to hit. I don’t think GP can co-exist with other models, they’ll either kill everyone else, or give up.”
Colantonio’s thoughts were corroborated by Larian Publishing director, Michael Douse, who commented, “‘What happens when all that money runs out?’ is the most vocal concern in my network, and one of the main economic reasons people I know haven’t shifted to its business model. The infinite money thing never made any sense”.
Colantonio suggested that Microsoft lied to them at first that “don’t worry, it doesn’t impact the sales,” only to “admit years later that it totally does”. The former Arkane boss maintained that Game Pass was cannibalizing sales and the only way the model “can co-exist without hurting everyone is for the back catalogue”.
In response to another comment from @johnlecavelier, who said Game Pass was not designed to be profitable or sustainable in the short to medium term but was instrumental at Microsoft’s attempt to push its game streaming business to the forefront of the market, Colantonio insisted the model was destroying the industry.
“I agree. But it’s a long game that involves throwing a tsunami at the entire ecosystem of the industry. Only the gamers like it because the offer is too good to be true, but eventually even gamers will hate it when they realize the effects on the games.”
Is Game Pass a total disaster to the game industry?
The way Colantonio painted Game Pass, it would feel as if the model was no good for the industry at all. However, there were some divergent views in the heated conversation pointing to the benefits of the model in the industry. Douse was one of those who thought the model had a place in the industry.
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“The economics never made sense, but at the same time I do recognize that for smaller teams with new or riskier IPs it helped derisk,” Douse wrote. “Much prefer Sony’s ‘lifecycle management’ strategy.”
Another divergent view came from @Eddie1Fastest who wrote, “I’ll tell you from my perspective as a consumer that Game Pass is great, why? because lately we’ve been trained to know that AAA games will be low quality at launch, generic copy and pastes of tired old genres, filled with micro transactions, or all of the above.”
“With the cost of games now being at the upward end of 80 dollars (not to mention whatever crap they feed you with the Ultimate super mega deluxe edition) it’s so much more safe and friendly to me to pay 15 bucks month for game pass. If you want to save your industry, you should figure out a way to again get back to where games are of decent quality to be worth the price publishers are asking not to mention the extra annoyances (MTs) that are in every game now.”
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