Gamepass

By Patrick Morris

Hey everybody welcome back to LegalSpeak a ColdNorth joint! I'm TheLawMorris and this is the video essay series in which I get to talk about the games I've been playing and what I think of the medium as a whole. You can find everything we do all in one spot over at ColdNorthPro.com, this week we are going to be talking about Xbox Gamepass so with no further ado lets get into it!

Quick disclaimer: everything I'm about to say is based on my own speculation. I have an economics degree so its not baseless unqualified speculation but just keep in mind that it is speculation none the less.

I want to come right out and say this at the beginning: in concept Gamepass is a great idea…honestly it's a game changing idea…in concept. In execution it's a great idea with some major flaws that prevent it from being anything more than a decent service. Microsoft has positioned Gamepass and advertised it as the best to play their first party games. The problem with this is that when compared to the onslaught of third party games the emphasis should be the other way around. Gamepass should be sold as the best way of playing third party games inherently positioning Xbox as the best platform to play most games on. For the past three or arguably four generations Nintendo hasn’t concerned themselves with third party experiences and the reason to own a Nintendo console has been the first party offerings. In Nintendo's case this has been a decision they consciously made but if Microsoft were to play their cards right the first party offerings being the sole reason to own a PlayStation could be thrust upon Sony.

Regardless of whatever magical land we want to live in where everything is free and we all skip home holding hands every day that’s not the real world. Things cost money and companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo arent running a charity. Revenue streams need to be generated in order to fund the big budget titles that we all love and at it's current price I don’t think Gamepass will be able to simultaineously sustain the fixed operative costs of the service and fund new big budget games that are system sellers like Halo, Gears of War, Fable, and Forza (yes I am still a believer that Fable is coming back). Cost of production of massive triple A and now as Microsoft is referring to them quadruple A titles is insanely high and without the traditional revenue model funding the next major title will be difficult. It's similar to why MoviePass failed so spectacularly except in Microsoft's case they have directly related hardware sales to subsidize the losses incurred, and they have a hugely diversified business to make it so that the entire companies future doesn’t depend on this one thing. In fact I would now like to issue a formal apology to Microsoft, I'm sorry I compared you to the flaming bag of dogshit that is Moviepass. Well I suppose I now offer flaming bags of dog shit an apology too. Flaming bags of dog shit everywhere, I'm sorry I compared you to Moviepass it really was uncalled for.

When looking at the revenue that Microsoft is trying to generate from Gamepass you have to look at who their target audience is. The people who are supposed to be paying for Gamepass is, well it's everybody but the people that are actually paying for Gamepass are teenagers parents and people that are simply not that into video games. When I was 13 and 14 years old every summer blockbuster would offer a three month pass to check out one game at a time and swap it out as much as you wanted. If I'm remembering correctly it was something like $30 per month. For my mom who was working from home at the time this was an amazing value so every summer she would shell out the $90 and I could play as many video games as I wanted and I also got a lot of exercise riding my bike to and from Blockbuster. I would guess at least half of the Gamepass subscriptions are parents doing exactly what my mom did, paying a subscription fee to be able to get something done for a change.

Who I think makes up the other half of the current Gamepass subscribers are the adults and college kids that simply arent that interested in video games. The people that buy Call of Duty and Madden or Fifa every year and pretty much nothing else. To these people video games are a good way to pass the time but they aren't their primary hobby or even one of their primary hobbies. These people are willing to spend roughly $120 to $150 per year on video games and that's about it. And considering the price of Gamepass being $120 annually Microsoft is faced with a challenge. They have to either convince those people to spend their money on Gamepass all year instead of Call of Duty and Fifa or they have to convince the demographic that is one of their most casual audiences to essentially double their annual video game budget. With the omnipresence of Call of Duty, Madden, and Fifa and the increasing popularity of free to play games like Apex Legends and Fortnite I think Gamepass may be targeting the wrong audience.

Fourteen years ago video streaming was in it's infancy and over time different services have experimented with different strategies and at this point there are three fairly apparent winners, Netflix (obviously), HBO, and Hulu. Each of these three services approaches the streaming game in a different way and each has different strengths. Country club like subscription services in the Video Game industry should be able to learn a few lessons from the video streaming industry and emulate the behavior and emphases of one of the three big players in order to user their recipe for success for skip a few steps.

Netflix is in my opinion the worst of the three. Netflix's strategy in the last several years seems to have been to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, oh and uh don’t bet on seinfeld, not their finest moment. Netflix is focused on making their original content the primary reason to subscribe to their service and every year they are either making or buying more original content than they did the year before. What started out as a fun little experiment has become an unrecognizable mass of widely varying quality like Jack Baker at the end of Resident Evil 7 and it's all called Netflix Originals. Sure we still get things like Stranger Things season one and The Santa Clarita Diet from time to time but the vast majority of the originals is mediocre at best and 13 Reasons Why at worst. And on top of the pile of originals Netflix has all the movies from ten years ago that nobody wanted to watch! What a deal!

HBO has taken almost the exact opposite approach as netflix. Yes they are still focused on their original series but that's almost all there is on HBO and they are so few and far between that when one comes you know it's going to be worth watching. I'm not a Game of Thrones fan, in fact that show is getting to Breaking Bad levels of obnoxious to where I just cant wait for it to be over so people will shut the fuck up about it. But no matter how annoyed I am with the fan's I cant deny the insane level of overall quality that show has. Production value, acting, writing, sets, story tellings, it's all fantastic. It's almost like it wasn’t a poop in the urinal they waited for their audience to find and hoped they would think it was funny.

And finally the middle of the road most level headed little brother of the bunch Hulu. Hulu's focus isn't about creating their own content it's delivering other people's content. When I don’t know what I want to watch, I go to Hulu. I go to Hulu because they put effort and investment into having a great library of third party content and that bankrolls a significantly smaller library of their own originals that for the most part kick ass, The Handmaids Tale and Castle Rock jump to mind.

Unfortunately it appears as though Microsoft is trying to emulate the Netflix model. Just throwing everything at the wall including things that shouldn't have been like Sea of Thieves, State of Decay 2, and Crackdown 3. I said it at the beginning of this video and I'll say it again now: Gamepass is a game changing idea (pun intended). But what they need to do is build up a great library of third party titles then up the monthly premium so it's a better value and more intriguing to players who are the ones who will eventually adopt this as just another bill that has to be paid once per year like Live of PSN. Chase a different crowd Microsoft, I'm willing to pay $20 or even $30 per month if we get big name titles on the service within eight months of release. Increase the value to the customer to appeal to the core gaming audience then increase the price because I really don’t think we will mind! That way youll get more revenue and then use that revenue to focus more intently on fewer games. Essentially what I'm saying in this video Microsoft is that if you let Gamepass fuck up Halo Infinite I will never forgive you!

Is anyone here watching this video subscribing to Gamepass? What made you finally pull the trigger? Let me know in the comments down below.

If you liked what you heard don’t forget to subscribe for a new video every week. And if you loved what you heard and you just cant get enough you can check out our podcast HardReset for more free form video game discussion or NoRefunds the podcast that watches bad movies so you don’t have to! You can find everything we do all in one spot over at ColdNorthPro.com, I will be back next week talking about the Sims so until then just go play some games.