With Xbox Game Pass and the newly announced PS Plus Collection all set to introduce more budget-friendly ways for gamers to play the AAA games in the market, all there’s left to wonder is: Why?
Also Read: PlayStation Plus Collection: How does it stack up to Xbox Game Pass?
The first party, as well as third party AAA games, are multi-millionaire projects that cost a substantial amount of time and money to develop. With games like Halo Infinite rumoured to have a development budget of over 500$ million, It is impossible to expect the publishers and developers to make ends meet with a 14$ monthly game subscription.
Speaking to gamesindustry.biz, Sony’s Jim Ryan recently talked about how bringing their first-party games at launch to a subscription service doesn’t make sense for them as these games have a budget of over 100$ million.
Whereas getting to play Microsoft’s incredible upcoming first-party games such as Avowed, Fable, HellBlade 2, Halo Infinite, etc on Xbox Game Pass is a delight from a consumer point of view, it also asks two inexplicable questions-
Is this necessary?
Does it make a difference?
Games like The Last Of Us Part 2, God Of War, Gears 5, Halo, etc sell incredibly well at launch without being a part of a subscription service. And indeed they will, considering how accessible they are and how profoundly they attract consumers.
Making them a part of a subscription service doesn’t really make much of a difference, rather it hurts the developers financially that worked incredibly hard years after years over a crunch period to finish off these projects in time.
One would rather be tempted to buy these huge open-world games such as Avowed, Fable, Horizon Forbidden West, where players could spend hundreds and hundreds of hours in, rather than pay every month to finish off the same game.
I am a budget gamer who buys over five or six big games at launch and even then I own about 12/18 games that are part of the upcoming PS Plus Collection. Why would I pay for a subscription service where I’m getting the same big, popular, AAA games that I already own?
It’s something I couldn’t understand even before these services expanded to be what it is. For example, it seemed pointless to make Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, a game that has sold over 16 million copies by the end of 2019, free on PS Plus because almost everyone had already played that game. It’s like waving to John Cena.
Deals like these don’t make sense. Whereas adding big first-party games at launch hurts the developers, adding these old AAA gems to a subscription feels like corporate bullshit.
Where these subscription services do shine however is when it gives the spotlight to AA and indie titles. For example, PS Plus is single-handedly responsible for the impeccable success of Fall Guys, which went on to become the most downloaded PS Plus game of all time. It also went on to break sales records on Steam where the game sold over seven million copies in less than a month.
As much as I enjoyed my time blasting my way through games such as Gears 5 and Halo Master Chief Collection, I was more surprised by games such as Outer Wilds, We Happy Few, Life Is Strange 2, Darksiders Genesis, Tell Me Why, and many other titles of such calibre, all of which I would have hesitated to buy at launch or ever at all.
Game Pass allowed me to experiment with these incredible, smaller experiences from less popular studios, and honestly, this is what it’s supposed to be. Subscriptions like these are about giving players the opportunity to experiment with new and exciting games that they haven’t heard of or are perhaps hesitant to buy at full price.
I would be more than happy to see these smaller, more diverse games from these studios rather than those AAA games that I’m already willing to spend 60 bucks( now 70) every so often, that not just seems unnecessary for the consumers, but also hurt the developers who make them.
